This book contains lectures presented in the symposium on "wave Instabili ties in S: pace Plasmas" organized wi thin the progrem of .t.y . XIX URSI General Assembly held in Helsinki, Finland, during tJ:

The Los Alamos Chapman Conference on Magnetospheric Substorms and Related Plasma Processes can be considered the fourth in a series devoted to magnetospheric substorms, after the Moscow (1971), Houston (1972), and Bryce Mountain (1974) meetings. The main motivation for organizing the Los Alamos Conference was that magnetospheric substorm studies have advanced enough to the point of bringing experimenters, analysts and theorists together to discuss major substorm problems with special emphasis on theoretical interpretations in terms of plasma processes. In spite of an extremely heavy schedule...

P. J. MESSAGE University of Liverpool The papers which comprise this volume were presented at Colloquium No. 41 of the International Astronimical Union, which was held in Cambridge, England, from the 17th to the 19th of August, 1976, and had as its subject 'Dynamics of Planets and Satellites and Theories of their Motion'. The Colloquium was held just prior to the XVIth General Assembly of the Union (which was held from 24th August to 2nd September, in Grenoble, France) to provide an opportunity for the presentation of research papers on a number of active and lively branches of Celestial...

Man, through intensive observations of natural phenomena, has learned about some of the basic principles which govern nature. The aurora is one of the most fascinating of these natural phenomena, and by studying it, man has just begun to comprehend auroral phenomena in terms of basic cosmic electrodynamic processes. The systematic and extensive observation of the aurora during and after the great international enterprise, the International Geophysical Year (lGY), led to the concept of the auroral substorm. Like many other geophysical phenomena, auroral displays have a dual time (universal-...

The I. A. U. Colloquium No. 29 was held in Budapest, September 1-5, 1975. The subject of the colloquium was: "Multiple Periodic Variable Stars". The colloquium was organized by the Scientific Organizing Committee consisting of W. S. Fitch (Chairman), M. W. Feast, B. V. Kukarkin, P. Ledoux, J. Smak, R. S. Stobie, B. Szeidl, B. Warner and S. C. Wolff. The local organization was placed in the hands of a Committee consisting of the staff of the Konkoly Observatory: B. Szeidl (Chairman), K. Barlai, M. Ill, S. Kany6 and L. Szabados. The colloquium was attended by about 90 scientists representing...

The Symposium on Infrared and Submillimeter Astronomy was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on June 8-10, 1976, as an activity associated with the Nineteenth Plenary Meeting of the Committee on Space Research (CaSPAR). The Symposium was sponsored jointly by CaSPAR, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the International Union of Radio Science CURSI). caSPAR is an interdisciplinary scientific organization, established by the International Council of Scientific Unions in 1958, to, in the words of its charter, "provide the world scientific community with the means whereby it...

The principal purpose of IAU Colloquium No. 35 was to discuss those aspects of the techniques of the compilation, evaluation, and distribution of data that are common to astrometry, photometry and spectrometry of stars and stellar systems. In the announcement of the Colloquium, it was suggested that there would be special emphasis on the techniques of quality control, and on the standards for the presentation of numerical data in both printed and com puter-readable form. As the meeting progressed it became clear that the lack of a standard, unambiguous system for the identifi cation of...

Michael Friedjung Though known since antiquity, novae are still poorly under- stood and present many problems. There has tended to be a lack of communication between theoreticians and observers and between different schools of thought, in spite of the advances of recent years in certain directions (observations of ordinary novae at minimum and of dwarf novae, theory of the causes of the explosion, etc *** ). The meeting whose proceedings are contained in this volume was organized to stimulate a confron- tation between the different ideas and results. The subject has changed a lot since 1963,...

Supernovae are among the most exciting things occurring in the universe. Much recent research has concentrated on phenomena related to supernovae. For example, the origin of the cosmic rays and the origin of the bulk of the heavy elements seem to be closely associated with the phenomenon of supernovae. With the discovery of the pulsar in the Crab, it seemed clear that supernovae were also intimately as- sociated with the formation of neutron stars and perhaps even black holes. The purpose of the conference, of which this volume contains the proceedings, was to bring together the leaders of...

On behalf of the IAU Commission 48 "High Energy Astrophysics" a special session on "CNO Isotopes in Astrophysics" was held at the General Assembly of IAU in Grenoble on August 30, 1976. This topic was chosen since it has recently included many exciting developments in various domains of physics and astrophysics such as for instance meteoritical studies, radioastronomy measurements of the interstellar gas, new determinations of nuclear reactions cross-sections and fractionation processes. The papers of this volume are the written versions of the talks which were presented during this session...