John Stanley Plaskett was Canada's pre-eminent astronomer in the first half of the twentieth century. His legacy lives on in the observatory he founded in Victoria, British Columbia, and the reputation he built for Canada as a nation making vital contributions to basic science. Plaskett's pioneering work with the most massive stars and his definitive determination of the rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy earned him international recognition of the highest order. Northern Star explores Plaskett's unorthodox and fascinating life from his rural roots near Woodstock, Ontario through his days as a technician at the University of Toronto to his initiation in astronomy at the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa. His greatest achievements followed after he persuaded the government of Canada, in spite of the strictures of the First World War, to finance what was then the world's largest operational telescope. Peter Broughton's accessible and engaging prose illuminates Plaskett's numerous achievements and the social, political, economic, and religious milieu surrounding them. This richly illustrated volume invites readers to understand the pull that Plaskett's passions, personality, and motivations exerted on him during his lifetime.

This volume is the proceedings of the IAU Symposium "Star Clusters." It includes the invited papers, brief accounts of the contributed papers, and the associated discussion. The topics discussed at the symposium included many aspects of recent research on open clusters and globular clusters. Because cluster studies touch on so many areas of stellar, galactic and extragalactic astronomy, this volume should be of interest to a wide astronomical readership. In setting up the scientific program for this symposium, the scientific organizers were mindful of a very successful NATO Advanced Study Institute at Cambridge (UK) in August, 1978, at which recent advances in globular cluster studies were thoroughly reviewed. So the emphasis at this symposium was on open clusters and problems common to open and globular clusters. One day only was scheduled exclusively for globular clusters, and the topics chosen for that day are ones in which rapid progress is being made. We would like to mention here two aspects of this symposium which contributed significantly to the useful and relaxed discussion following the scientific contributions.