Motions And Absolute Magnitudes Of Rr Lyrae Stars

Complete account of the applications of RR Lyrae stars in professional astronomy.

After the same pattern as the XIII th General Assembly of the International Astronom ical Union the present Volume of the Highlights in Astronomy contains the texts of the invited discourses given at the XIVth General Assembly held in Brighton, England, August 1970. It contains further the papers and discussion remarks presented at the six joint discussions, as well as the invited papers given at the special session on the Moon. In addition this Volume contains the papers given at the joint meeting of Commissions 24, 27, 30, 33 and 37 on RR Lyrae Stars. It goes without saying that the nearly hundred papers printed in this Volume represent only a minor part of all matter dealt with at the XIVth General Assembly of the Union; the many important discussions that took place in a few hundred commission meetings are not included. For short abstracts and reviews of these the reader is referred to Transactions of the International Astronomical Union XIVB. I wish to thank those who contributed to this Volume for the speed in submitting the manuscripts of their papers. This, together with the efficiency of the Publishers allowed for a rapid publication.

An authoritative account of the contributions to science made by the Hipparcos satellite, for astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists.

An accessible introduction to globular clusters for graduate students, and a comprehensive and up-to-date reference for researchers.

The changing character of the IAU General Assemblies becomes most clear from a comparison of the agenda of the Brighton meeting with that of one of the earlier meetings. The fourth General Assembly (Cambridge Mass. , 1932) had about 240 participants, registered guests included, the Brighton meeting had about 2300 people attending. The Cambridge meeting lasted 5, working days, of which, however, three half days were exclusively devoted to excursions, leaving four real meeting days. At that time the nearly 30 commissions had each only one meeting, during part of a morning or afternoon; some commissions did not meet at all. There was one public lecture, by Sir Arthur Eddington, on 'The Expanding Universe'. Most of the small European countries were represented by two or three delegates only, but the delegations of France and Great Britain were composed of 20 and 18 scientists respectively; at that time there were only two delegates from Germany. After the Brighton General Assembly, with about 200 commission meetings - one commission met eleven times! - six Joint Discussions, four Invited Discourses, a Special Meeting and hardly time for excursions, there were a few complaints about too many overlapping meetings.

Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts, which has appeared in semi-annual volumes since 1969, is de voted to the recording, summarizing and indexing of astronomical publications throughout the world. It is prepared under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (according to a resolution adopted at the 14th General Assembly in 1970). Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts aims to present a comprehensive documentation of literature in all fields of astronomy and astrophysics. Every effort will be made to ensure that the average time interval between the date of receipt of the original literature and publication of the abstracts will not exceed eight months. This time interval is near to that achieved by monthly abstracting journals, com pared to which our system of accumulating abstracts for about six months offers the advantage of greater convenience for the user. Volume 13 contains literature published in 1975 and received before August 15, 1975; some older literature which was received late and which is not recorded in earlier volumes is also included. We acknowledge with thanks contributions to this volume by Dr. J. Bouska, who surveyed journals and publications in the Czech language and supplied us with abstracts in English, and by the Common wealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (C.S.I.R.O.), Sydney, for providing titles and abstracts of papers on radio astronomy. We want to acknowledge valuable contributions to this vol ume by Zentralstelle ftir Atomkemenergie-Dokumentation, Leopoldshafen, which supported our ab stracting service by sending us retrospective literature searches.