Organizations People And Strategies In Astronomy

When I wasa child, growing up in South America,I often went camping in the wild and hence had direct access to the wondrous Southern sky; the Southern Cross was all mine at the time. Little did I know then that the study of the sky would take such a huge importance in my life, and that in the end astronomy and astrophysics would in many ways become my country and my religion. I have lived in several di?erent countries, and when asked my nationality, I am always very tempted to reply: astronomer. I started as a theorist, and my only dream in my youth was to spend nights thinking and calculating, with paper and pencil, and to have the impression by dawn that I had understood something new. So at the time astronomy was seen or dreamt by me as a solitary endeavour, with periodic encounters with my wise adviser and professors; it is this model that I adopted when doing my PhD work. My generation has lived through many revolutions of all kinds. Those in astronomy, I believe, remain particularly remarkable, and I am a true product of them. Now, I elect to live and work in large organizations, and to share my endeavours with many people. And I relish the series of Andr ́ e Heck on Organizations and Strategies in Astronomy, which help us recover our memories, reconstitute our own story, and read with glee about our neighbouring or far-away colleagues.

I am most grateful to Andr ́ e Heck for his invitation to write a foreword to OSA Volume 4 – I will use this valued opportunity to emphasise those topics in Vol. 4 which I consider important even if other topics may be of even greater importance in the universal scale of things. At the outset let me say that I commend Vol. 4 to its readers – it contains much of very great interest for organisations and strategies in astronomy. A topic which I consider to be of very great importance at this time is Adverse Environmental Impact on Astronomy. There are two papers on this topic in OSA 4 – Cohen on Strategies for Protecting Radio Ast- nomy and Schwarz on Light Pollution Control. The growth in the extent of use, the power and spectral demand for radio transmission continues to increase virtually exponentially. The impact on the ‘listening’ services such as radio astronomy has been severe. Only by creativity in developing new techniques for radio noise (including legal transmissions) reduction and by participating fully in the allocation process for radio frequencies has radio astronomy developed to the powerful investigative tool it is today.

Astronomy isthemostancientsciencehumanshavepracticedonEarth. Itisascienceofextremesandoflargenumbers:extremesoftime–fromthe big bang to in?nity –, of distances, of temperatures, of density and masses, ofmagnetic?eld,etc.Itisasciencewhichishighlyvisible,notonlybecause stars and planets are accessible in the sky to the multitude, but also - cause the telescopes themselves are easily distinguishable, usually on top of scenic mountains, and also because their cost usually represent a subst- tialproportionofthenation’sbudgetandofthetaxpayerscontributionsto that budget. As such, astronomy cannot pass unnoticed. It touches on the origins of matter, of the Universe where we live, on life and on our destiny. It touches on philosophy as well as on religion. Astronomy is the direct c- tactofhumankindwithitsoriginsandtheimmensityofuniversalnature.It is indeed a science of observation where experimentation is practically - possible and which is ruled by mathematics, physics, chemistry, statistical analysis and modelling, while o?ering the largest number of veri?cations of the most advanced theories of fundamental physics such as general r- st ativity and gravitation. At the beginning of the 21 century astronomy is clearly a multidisciplinary activity touching on all aspects of science. It is therefore logical that in the past and still now, astronomy has attracted the most famous scientists, be they pure observers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, experimentalists, and even politicians.

Research and publications in the field of Astronomy have undergone dramatic changes in the last half-century. While activities just slowed down during World War II in the US and in Latin America, they were very strongly affected by the difficult conditions prevailing among the European belligerent nations. Half a century ago, re search activities were mostly confined to observatories (linked or not to universities) and usually separated from the teaching of physical sciences. Hence, directors of observatories played an important role in the choice of the research fields, and "schools" of research appeared at various places, de veloping specific instrumentation, reduction techniques and mathematical methods to achieve their scientific goals. Reorganising the research activities after the war was no minor under taking, specially because communications were interrupted for over five years and isolated continental Europe from overseas activities. Scarcity of observing instruments (some of them being requisitioned by occupy ing armies) , enormous gaps in the available litterature led to local research activities, conducted independently of similar efforts undertaken elsewhere.

We have arrived at the third volume of this useful series on Organiza tions and Strategies in Astronomy (OSA). It contains seventeen articles on a wide range of topics, from virtual observatories, astronomy organizations in various communities (Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, South Africa), and the role of ground stations in space observatories, to quality assurance in UK higher education. In this foreword, I shall give some views on ideas expressed in this volume, in particular from my personal experience when I was project officer for the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). Let me first remind readers that present and future astronomy is in creasingly dependent on high-level management. Not everybody knows that the scheduling of the Hubble Space Telescope is performed by a neural network software called SPIKE, described in the stimulating workshop New Observing Modes for the Next Centuryl, partly reported in OSA Volume II by 1. Robson. New observing facilities, in space or on the ground, are so complex that they need highly qualified engineers and rigorous management procedures. Each observing hour on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) fa cility is worth about EUR 7,000, including the amortization of the capital expenses over 30 years. This does not leave much room for amateurism, neither in the time allocation procedures, nor in the daily telescope control.

Seated in a sun-lit corner of his 17th century Dutch house, his hand touching a celestial globe, Johannes Vermeer's "Astronomer" seems to pon der about the mysteries of the universe. We might make the trip to Paris and ask him, in the Louvre, what precisely is on his mind. Unfortunately, there will be no answer. But we do know what his mind was not on. It was not on the approaching deadlines for the proposals he would have to write for getting funds and telescope-time, not on the meeting of the observing programs committee, not on his refereeing duty for the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, nor on his university's tightening budget for science. In the Kapteyn Institute at Groningen I stand face to face with the im pressive portrait of J.C. Kapteyn, painted in the year 1918. Seated at his desk he is doing his calculations with pen, pencil and tables, perhaps check ing the work of his skilled staff of human computers. Early in his career he had completed his magnum opus, the Cape Photographic Durchmusterung in collaboration with his close friend David Gill at Capetown, South Africa.