Leo Goldberg Kitt Peak National Observatory Tucson, Arizona 85726, U. S. A. Of all the reasons for exploring the Universe, none is more com pelling than the possibility of discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Still the quest for extraterrestrial life has been near the bottom of the astronomers' list of priorities, not because the number of extraterrestrial civilizations is conjectured to be van ishingly small, but because our powers of detection were thought to be far too weak. About ten years ago, however, the growing reach of ra dio telescopes on the ground and of optical...

This is the latest effort in a sequence of presentations begun in 1949 with a series of lectures on long-focus photographic astrometry given by the author as Fulbright professor in Paris at the invitation by the late H. Mineur, at that time Director of the Institut d' Astrophysique. These earlier lectures were published as a series of review articles in Popular Astronomy (1951) and appeared both as Contributions de l'Institut d'Astrophysique, Serie A, No. 81 and as reprint No. 75 of Sproul Observatory. A more elaborate presenta tion was given in 1963 in Stars and Stellar Systems, which was...

The IAU Colloquium No. 59, "The effects of mass loss on Stellar Evolution" was held on September 15-19, 1980 at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Miramare, Trieste (Italy), under the auspices of the IAU Executive Co mittee and the Italian National Council of Research. The planning of this conference began two years ago du- ring the IAU Symposium No. 83 "Mass loss and evolution of 0 type stars" (Qualicum Beach, Victoria, Canada) when we felt that mass loss and its effects on the evolution of stars was too broad a subject for being confined to 0 type stars only. Therefore we...

Professor Zdenek Kopal is sixty-seven this year even though his scientific activity, enthusiasm and springy step hardly betray the ad- vancement in years. He carne to Manchester as Professor of Astronomy thirty years ago after a very fruitful association of fourteen years with the Harvard Observatory. Much impressed with the young man, Harlow Shapley, who with characteristic insight had recognised in Kopal the qualities that have since made him an outstanding leader in ec1ipsing binary research, had invited him over as a Research Associate. In the subsequent decade Kopal set about the task of...

Proceedings of the Symposium on Neutral Clouds Near Hll Regions - Dynamics and Photochemistry' held in Penticton, British Columbia, 24-26 June 1981

Interest world-wide in the provision of new observational astro- nomical facilities in the form of ground-based optical telescopes of large aperture has never been higher than exists at present. The benefits to be gained from increased aperture size, however, are only utilised effectively if efficient instrumentation is also available. There have been significant improvements recently in this area, part- icularly in detector technology and data handling as well as in optical design, so that systems which are currently being developed have the capability of being vastly more powerful in terms...

Proceedings of the 63rd Colloquium of the International Astronomical Union, held at Grasse, France, May 22-27, 1982

As it was said by one of the participants to this workshop" In our attempts to understand the spectral evolution of galaxies, we are fortunate indeed to have the ability to look back in time and observe galaxies as they were billions of years ago. Perhaos in no other discipline is it possible to gain such a direct view to hJstory. The galaxies we seek to study are remote, their light faint, and thus only recently has it become technicaJlv feasible to sample the spectra of normal luminosity galaxies at lookback times of five billion years or more" ...or, perhaps. even to see galaxies in the...

This volume contains papers presented at IAU Colloquium No. 90. at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in May of 1985. A few additional contributions are included from authors who for various reasons were unable to attend the meeting. Four years have passed since the last major international conference on chemically peculiar stars of the upper main sequence was held in Liege. Belgium in 1981. Previous conferences were held in 1975 (Vienna. Austria) and in 1965 (Greenbelt. Maryland. USA). As the proceedings of this Colloquium show. the recent availability of ultraviolet spectra of large...

Proceedings of the International Workshop, Delhi, India, November 14-16, 1985