Bøger af W. B. Burton

Outstanding progress in near-infrared detection technology and in real-time image processing has led astronomers to start undertaking all-sky surveys in the 1--2 mum range (project DENIS in Europe and 2MASS in the U.S.A.), surveys which will have a considerable impact in various areas of astronomy. This book gathers the contributions of more than 80 specialists involved in fields of interest as different as low mass stars, late stages of stellar evolution, star formation, stellar populations of the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds, the local structure of the Universe, and observational cosmology. It describes the impact on these fields of the exhaustive data bases and catalogs of stars and galaxies that these surveys will provide. The considerable interest of these documents for the future of infrared space and ground-based projects and the complementarity with other currently ongoing or planned surveys in other spectral ranges are emphasized.

The millimetre and submillimetre spectral region (300 to 3000 Ilm or 1000 to 100 GHz) was until recently one of the few spectral regimes not fully opened up for astronomical studies. Thanks both to improvements in detectors and receivers and to the construction of large telescopes at high altitude sites this situation is improving very rapidly. Three major telescopes have been built recently and are coming into operation during 1987 and 1988, namely the 15m James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the lOAm Caltech Submillimetre Observatory (CSO) telescope, both located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the 15 m Swedish -ESO telescope (SEST) in Chile. Because a very wide range of astronomical problems can be tackled with these major new facilities there is a great deal of interest from the many potential new users anxious to become familiar with this rapidly developing field. During 1986 it became clear to British and Dutch astronomers involved in planning the commissioning and operation of the JCMT, that a summer school in this field would greatly benefit the potential and actual JCMT user community. With financial support from the SERC and supplemented by a grant from the ZWO, the Summer School on 'Millimetre and Submillimetre Astronomy' was held at Stirling University from June 21 to 27, 1987.