Prof. J. Oort & M. Schmidt
Prof. G. Burbidge et al. (Can you recall some of et als?)
Prof. Martin Ryle et al.
Prof. Geoffrey R. Burbidge et al.
Prof. S. B. Pikelner (Moscow)
Prof. Ya. B. Zeldovich & Prof. E. Salpeter
Ihsan Hafez is just one of twelve mature-age, part-time, off-campus history of astronomy students enrolled for a Doctorate at James Cook University, and has been researching the various manuscripts of the Book of the Fixed Stars (Figure 1), penned by the famous Arabic astronomer, Abdul-Rahman al-Sufī. The search for manuscripts of this book has taken Ihsan from his home-town of Beirut to Berlin, Bologna, Copenhagen, Istanbul, London, Madrid, New York, Oxford, Paris, St Petersburg, Tehran and the Vatican.
Unfortunately, the current ‘situation’ in Beirut has dashed Ihsan’s plan to discuss his research at the Prague GA, but one of his supervisors, Professor Richard Stephenson, will step into the void on Wednesday and present their joint paper at the meeting of the IAU Working Group on Archives.
This particular WG meeting offers other equally-appealing papers. Adam Perkins from the Cambridge University Library will discuss a bound volume of Airy manuscripts relating to the discovery of Neptune that disappeared from the Library during the 1960s only to mysteriously re-emerge in Chile in 1998 following the death of a notable astronomer.
Astronomical historians have also been busy researching Japanese astronomical archives. Mitsuru Soma and Kiyotaka Tanikawa from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan will discuss the digitization of old records containing solar and lunar eclipses, lunar occultations, planetary conjunctions and meteorological phenomena, while Tomoko Fujiwara (Kyushu University) and Masanori Hirai (Fukuoka University of Education) will examine the origins and history of the “Sekido Nanboku Kosei Zu” star charts.
A paper on archival programs for smaller institutions with limited budgets by Antoinette Beiser (Lowell Observatory), Ellen Bouton (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) and Brenda Corbin (U.S. Naval Observatory), will be followed by a an account of recent archival developments at Paris Observatory (by Laurence Bobis and Suzanne Débarbat) and a report by Ileana Chinnici, Agnese Mandrino and Fabrizio Bònoli on the ambitious “Specola 2000” Project, which was initiated in 2000 and aims to catalogue all astronomical archives housed in Italian observatories.
Wednesday morning’s WG meeting in Club Room E also includes three poster papers, and offers much of interest to those from observatories, research institutes or university departments with astronomical archives.
Manuscripts of Al-Sufi’s Book of the Fixed Stars are decorated with splendid constellation maps, and tables of astronomical data. Here are just two examples.
How many trees does it take to run a GA?
Conference meetings are a great source of information, and open many doors of opportunity. Topics for astronomy range from ones in which human impact is out of the question, to ones in which it is all-important. Meetings generate large quantities of paper, intended of course to be read, digested and/or taken home, but inevitably much is not, and like unsolicited mail it has to be tossed, somewhere. Then all those emptied plastic water-bottles and drink cans. Disproportionate numbers are produced at a conference because we require single servings and cannot refill our glasses as we would at home. How are we organizing the collection, recycling and reduction of all this extra waste which we seem obliged to generate?
And are we practising what we preach in persuading the general public to clean up ITS environment so that we can enjoy the pursuit of blue-skies research?