ASTRONOMICAL ECLIPSE PHENOMENA In looking over the long history of human science from time immemorial to our own times, it is impossible to overestimate the role played in it by the phenomena of eclipses of the celestial bodies-both within our solar system as well as in the stellar universe at large. Not later than in the 4th century B. C. , the observed features of the shadow cast on the Moon by the Earth during eclipses led Aristotle (384-322 B. C. ) to formulate the first scientific proof worthy of that name of the spherical shape of the Earth; and only somewhat later, the eclipses of the...

The words of this preface were written when the book was ready to go to the press; and are limited to only a few points which are best made in this place. As is intimated by the sub-title, the whole volume was written with appli- cations in mind to double-star astronomy. The latter is, however, not the only branch of our science which could benefit from its contents. The same is true of certain aspects of the dynamics of stellar systems or galaxies (the stellar popula- tions of which are also characterized by the fact that the mean-free-path of their constituent stars are long in comparison...

Proceedings of the 97th Colloquium of the International Astronomical Union, held in Brussels, Belgium, June 8-13, 1987

During the past years, a number of international astronomical conferences were held at the Remeis-Observatory in Bamberg, four of them sponsored by the International Astronomical Union. The first meeting was organized in 1959 and dealt with Variable Stars, the last one was held in 1981 and focussed on 'Binary and Multiple Stars as Tracers of Stellar Evolution'. The present conference was organized to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, who was born in Minden on July 22, 1784, and died in Konigsberg on March 17, 1846. When the plan for an international...