In May 1986 a two-day workshop on Physical Processes in Comets, Stars and Active Galaxies was held at the Ringberg Castle near Lake Tegernsee, and this rather unusml. l collection of topics needs a few words of explanation. When we first thought of organizing a workshop on such a large variety of astrophysical objects our main motivation was to honor Rudolf Kippenhahn and Hermann Ulrich Schmidt on the occasion of their 60th birthdays, and we planned to cover at least a fraction of their fields of active research. We then realized immediately that despite the fact that the objects are so...

The recent discovery of a type II supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud provides a rare chance to compare models of stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis directly with observations. This workshop covers thermonuclear reaction rates in chaos (experimental and theoretical), stellar evolution, nucleosynthesis and isotopic anomalies in meteorites and, in a final section, the supernovae, in particular SN 1987A. It brings the most interesting news in the rapidly developing field of nuclear astrophysics to researchers and also to graduate students. Recent and future developments are discussed....