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ORGANIZATIONS
AND STRATEGIES
IN ASTRONOMY
VOLUME 7

Edited by

ANDRÉ HECK
Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory,
France
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 1-4020-5300-2 (HB)

ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5300-9 (HB)
ISBN-10 1-4020-5301-0 (e-book)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5301-6 (e-book)

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 Table of contents

• Foreword
(R.M. Bonnet/ISSI) ix

• Editorial 1

• British Astronomy
(P. Murdin/Inst. Astron. Cambridge & RAS) 13

• Astronomy, Astrophysics and Space Physics in Greece

(V. Charmandaris/Univ. Crete) 49

• Astronomy in Ukraine
(Ya.V. Pavlenko/MAO et al.) 71

• Focussing European Astronomy

– ESO’s Role in the ‘Comeback’ of European Astronomy
(C. Cesarsky & C. Madsen/ESO) 97

• The International Space Science Institute (ISSI)

– An Interview with Roger M. Bonnet 115

• The International Space University (ISU)

(W. Peeters/ISU) 125

• EuroPlaNet: European Planetology Network

(M. Blanc/CESR et al.) 155

• RadioNet: Advanced Radio Astronomy Across Europe

(A.G. Gunn/JBO) 171

• Selecting and Scheduling Observing Proposals

at NRAO Telescopes
(D. Hogg/NRAO) 181

v
vi TABLE OF CON TEN TS

• Selecting and Scheduling Observations

at the IRAM Observatories
(M. Grewing/IRAM) 203

• Selecting, Scheduling and Carrying out

Observing Programmes at CFHT
(Chr. Veillet/CFHT) 227

• The Scholarly Journals

of the American Astronomical Society
(R.W. Milkey/AAS) 241

• Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

(P. Murdin/RAS) 263

• Astronomy & Astrophysics

– A Journal of Astronomers for Astronomers
(G. Meynet/Geneva Obs.) 273

• LISA
– The Library and Information Services
in Astronomy Conferences
(B. Corbin/USNO & U. Grothkopf/ESO) 285

• The ADS Success Story

¨ ther Eichhorn
– An Interview with Gun 307

• The Progressive World Penetration

of the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center (1970-1990)
(A. Heck/Strasbourg Obs.) 315

• The Genesis of the IAU WG on Astronomical Data

(G.A. Wilkins/Univ. Exeter) 355

• Biographical Sources for Astronomers

(W.R. Dick) 367

• German Astronomy in the Third Reich

(H.W. Duerbeck/VUB) 383
 TABLE OF CON TEN TS vii

• The Psychology of Physical Science

(G.J. Feist/UCD) 415

• Thinking Like an Astronomer

(M.E. Gorman/Univ. Virginia) 419

• Mercury Magazine: The Incarnation of a Society

(J.C. White II/Gettysburg Coll.) 429

• Sterne und Weltraum

– A Popular Magazine Devoted to Science
and its Use in School Teaching
(J. Staude/MPIA) 439

• Communicating Astronomy with the Public

and the Washington Charter
(I. Robson/UK ATC) 449

• Communicating X-Ray Astronomy

(M. Watzke/Chandra X-Ray Ctr) 463

• Establishing an Effective Education

and Public Outreach Program at Gemini Observatory
– A Case Study
(P. Michaud/Gemini Obs.) 477

• Public Outreach
at The University of Texas McDonald Observatory
– A Brief History and Current Overview
(S.L. Preston/McDonald Obs.) 495

• The Europlanetarium Genk

– The Story of a Planetarium
(Chr. Janssen/Europlan.) 517

• The INSAP V Experience on Art and Astronomy

(M. Bolt/Adler Planetarium) 537
viii TABLE OF CON TEN TS

• What Does the New Climate for Dialogue and Debate

Mean for Communicating Astronomy?
(St. Miller/UCL) 543

• Communicating Astronomy
– Successes and Limits
(P. Murdin/Inst. Astron. Cambridge) 553

• Updated Bibliography of Socio-Astronomy 565

FOREWORD

Astronomy is the most ancient science humans have practiced on Earth.

It is a science of extremes and of large numbers: extremes of time – from the
big bang to infinity –, of distances, of temperatures, of density and masses,
of magnetic field, etc. It is a science which is highly visible, not only because
stars and planets are accessible in the sky to the multitude, but also be-
cause the telescopes themselves are easily distinguishable, usually on top of
scenic mountains, and also because their cost usually represent a substan-
tial proportion of the nation’s budget and of the tax payers contributions to
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 con-
tact of humankind with its origins and the immensity of universal nature. It
is indeed a science of observation where experimentation is practically im-
possible and which is ruled by mathematics, physics, chemistry, statistical
analysis and modelling, while offering the largest number of verifications
of the most advanced theories of fundamental physics such as general rel-
ativity and gravitation. At the beginning of the 21st 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.
It is open to the non scientists: amateurs can practice astronomy and
they do abound all around the world, sometimes contributing to discoveries
like in the case of comets. The images of galaxies and of planets do possess
an undisputable beauty and, naturally, astronomy is a subject of interest
and most often of excitation to the public. It is one of the most popular
branches of science. The drawback, unfortunately, is that it has a tendency
of sometimes lying at the limit of scientific rigor. However, the rigorous
scientific character of astronomy as well as its popularity re-enforces the
need for a broad distribution of scientific results and discoveries in the
peer-reviewed journals as well as in more popular magazines and reviews.

ix
A. Heck (ed.), Organizations and Strategies in Astronomy, ix– xi.
© 2006 Springer.
x FOREWORD

As old as it is, astronomy looks remarkably young. This is because in

the past 50 years, it has witnessed a genuine revolution. Revolution in the
techniques and technologies of observation, which started with the devel-
opment of larger and bigger telescopes, of radio-astronomy and, since the
beginning of the space age, of observatories operating above the Earth’s
atmosphere, accessing the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum, free
of turbulence image-deterioration effects, revealing phenomena which had
no or very little observational signatures in visible light from ground-based
observations. Astronomy, together with nuclear physics and space science,
is part of the so-called big sciences. In the course of the last 25 years, the
revolution has accelerated with the development of even larger telescopes in
the 10 meters class, like the Very Large Telescope under the responsibility
of ESO, of interferometry like the VLA, IRAM, and ALMA. The advent of
the Charge Coupled Devices (CCD), replacing the old photographic plate,
together with the informatics revolution, have led to the development of a
more precise numerical astronomy and to the establishment of data bases
remotely accessible and at the same time, to the concept of virtual obser-
vatories.
Because stars and galaxies are by essence accessible to everybody on
this planet – those who are rich and technologically advanced, as well as
the poorer but nonetheless open-minded populations, curious and avid of
knowledge as they are –, astronomy is (as it has always been) an activity of
intrinsic international character. This character is amplified today by the
need of sharing among nations or groups of nations the big facilities which
demand resources very often far too expensive for individual countries re-
sources.
On the other hand, this revolution bears in itself potentially and some-
what concerning adverse effects. The size of instruments require the support
of big organizations, rely more and more on big industries and less on small
groups of experimenters and of laboratory physicists. For the new genera-
tion of students, the tendency to avoid risks in the running of their research
in view of getting diplomas and PhDs in the shortest possible time, leads
to the development of a new class of astronomers which we could qualify
as “arm chairs-CRT astronomers”, spending their time more and more on
computers and less and less in the development of observational techniques
or even hardware. Getting one’s hands dirty in astronomy is less and less
easy these days. We witness a tendency for some kind of autism among the
young generation being less sociologically active and more remote from the
reality of the needs and of the tools and of the mechanisms that support
their research.
These general – and somewhat trivial comments – outline the more
pressing need to describe not only to the scientists themselves but also to
 FOREWORD xi

the public at large, the complexity of the network of tools that make mod-
ern astronomy one of the most essential branches of science and a vector of
knowledge that permanently pushes the limits of our curiosity and of our
ignorance. This last volume of the Organizations and Strategies in Astron-
omy books is to be seen as a crowning piece of the previous descriptions
contained in the past volumes of the series of these complex mechanisms.
Readers will get closely in touch with the management of big programs.
They will learn how international organizations operate and how individual
nations, both the most advanced and the less advanced can develop their
own means as well as sharing their resources in common with others in the
development of big facilities. They will acquire the notion of this interna-
tional character also through the networking of data bases of astronomical
objects, of observational data, of scientific articles and of the bibliography
of the actors of astronomy, those who contributed to the most advanced
discoveries and those who devoted their life and careers to the development
of new techniques.
Readers will perceive the concerns that confront astronomy in the mod-
ern age of space and the growing severity of competition to access these
big facilities, and how the supporting international organizations respond
to the needs of the scientists worldwide. They will perceive the tremendous
power of astronomy for education and for responding to the most profound
philosophical questions confronting humanity since the birth of its cognitive
capacity. At the same time, they will be in close contact with the needs for
scientific rigor as well as with the responsibility for astronomers to trans-
mit their acquired knowledge to those who through their daily work and
their taxes make the development of these facilities and of this research
possible. They will be confronted to the fundamental need of scientists and
of astronomers for free thinking, for preserving their capacity and their
responsibility in resisting political or anti-scientific arguments.
The leading master of this series, André Heck, should be warmly con-
gratulated for having taken the initiative of this series and having led this
set of useful tools. There is a need for pursuing this activity in the fu-
ture given the rapid status of evolution of astronomy as the new century
promises to be one of even more numerous and extraordinary discoveries,
as the tools described in the OSA books become operational and deliver
their promises.

Roger-Maurice Bonnet
[email protected]
ISSI Executive Director
President of COSPAR
May 2006.
EDITORIAL

A Matter of Innovation

– Majesty, I thought it was the most promising work I heard in years.

– Well, then we should make some effort to acquire him. We could use
a good German composer in Vienna. I am sure he could be tempted with
the right offer, say, an opera in German for our National Theater.
– Excellent, Sire.
– But not in German, I beg you, Your Majesty. Italian is the proper
language for opera. All educated people agree on that.
– Hmhm. What do you think, Chamberlain?
– In my opinion, Sire, it is timely we had a piece in our own language.
Plain German for plain people.
– Hmhm. Kapellmeister?
– Majesty, I most agree with il Direttore: German is, scusate, too brutal
for scene.
– Hmhm. Court Composer, what do you think?
– I think it is an interesting notion to keep Mozart in Vienna, Majesty.
It should really infuriate the Archbishop [of Salzburg] beyond measure,
if this is Your Majesty’s intention.
– You are cattivo, Court Composer. I want to meet this young man.
Chamberlain, please arrange this!
[Amadeus (Shaffer 1981, Forman/Shaffer 1984)]

The central point of this imaginary discussion around Austrian Emperor

Joseph II about hiring W.A. Mozart is not so much about language and
strategy than about timely innovation within an established context. Like
many of you certainly experienced it already, when one wishes to undertake
or launch something new, there are always choruses of people chanting it
will never work for a number of reasons and that it is not even worth
trying. This happened with this series of Organizations and Strategies in
Astronomy (OSA) volumes too.

1
A. Heck (ed.), Organizations and Strategies in Astronomy, 1–12.
© 2006 Springer.
2 EDITORIAL

But a survey carried out around mid-1998 among the world-wide astro-
nomical community revealed a hard kernel of people interested in what this
Editor then called the socio-dynamics of astronomy. Helmut A. Abt was
among the strong supporters and, as shown in the bibliographic compila-
tion at the end of each OSA volume, Helmut is the most prominent author
in the field1 .
Rather than to publish yet another confidential newsletter, or to orga-
nize an even more confidential workshop, it appeared more appropriate to
gather together major (“review”) contributions in an edited book. This idea
received a warm welcome at Kluwer Academic Publishers (now Springer)
in the person of Harry (J.J.) Blom. And there has been so much material
to be published that follow-up volumes were in order, produced at a yearly
rythm until this seventh one, breaking records in terms of size and number
of papers – all in all, an impressive collection of more than 150 chapters
by an even more impressive gallery of authors, with grandees of astronomy
honoring each volume with their Foreword. What an immense pleasure for
the OSA Editor-catalyzer to put all this together!
The range of subjects tackled in those seven volumes has been quite
broad and space is lacking in this Editorial to review the tables of contents
in detail2 , but here are the main themes:
– characteristics and strategies of astronomy-related organizations (globally
and specifically, nationally and internationally), with a planetary sample
including even Antarctica;
– recruitment and promotional policies;
– economy of activities;
– evaluation processes (proposals, individuals, institutions, etc.);
– policies for professional publications;
– bibliometric studies;
– evolving sociology of scheduling and coordinated observing;
– communication under its diverse facets;
– series of astronomy-related conferences;
– interactions with other communities and the society at large;
together with a long list of matters covering the astronomy-related life and
context, in the spirit of sharing specific expertise and lessons learned.
Rather than being devoted to the publication of hard-science results,
the OSA volumes describe how astronomy research lives: how it is planned,
funded and organized, how it interacts with other disciplines and the rest
of the world, how it communicates, etc. Thus this series has been a unique
medium for scientists and non-scientists (sometimes from outside astron-
omy) to describe their experience and to elaborate on non-purely scientific
1
He also contributed to this series with chapters in OSA 1, OSA 2, OSA 4 and OSA 6.
2
See http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/∼heck/osabooks.htm and linked pages.
 EDITORIAL 3

Figure 1. ‘Les Phases de la Lune II’ [The Phases of the Moon II] (1941), oil on canvas
(143×175 cm2 ) by Paul Delvaux (1897-1994). The door largerly open in the center gives
way to a desertic or lunar nightly landscape, with a bright comet in an abundantly starry
sky and a Full Moon. Or is rather this Moon an eclipsed one? Indeed a Full Moon would
be so bright that neither the stars nor the comet would be visible. The way the Moon
is painted, with a brighter left edge and details visible in the dark area, would ideally
represent a Full Moon at the limit of a total eclipse. The question here is whether the
artist did it intentionally. Note the scheme on the blackboard describing the phenomenon
of the phases of the Moon, also present in Delvaux’s third version of the Phases of
the Moon reproduced in OSA 4’s Editorial, as well as in The Astronomers illustrating
OSA 6’s Editorial. When Delvaux was about seven years old, the secretary of his father
(a lawyer) gave him a copy of Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea. His subsequent enthusiasm for Verne’s works explains the frequent appearance in
his paintings of Otto Lidenbrock (the geologist from the Journey to the Centre of the
Earth ) from the original illustration by Edouard Riou: he is the foreground character on
the right with a kind of frock coat, the glasses on the forehead and examining closely
an ammonite, a rock, an undefined object and sometimes ... nothing in his hands. He
first appeared in March 1939 in the Phases of the Moon I. The middle-class gentleman
with the bowler hat at the extreme right is another souvenir from Delvaux’s youth: a
man he saw passing every day at the same hour on the sidewalk in front of his house
and who became a kind of concept, that of a civil servant from one of the numerous
administrations or ministries in Brussels where he was living then (Debra 1991). This
character is appearing in many of Delvaux’s paintings. See Nath (1997) for more on
Delvaux’s pieces with astronomy-related elements. (Galerie Patrick Derom, by courtesy)
4 EDITORIAL

matters – often of fundamental importance for the efficient conduct of our

activities.
As illustrated by the histogram included in OSA 6’s Editorial, the
global number of astronomy-related papers on organizational, strategical
and socio-dynamical issues is growing more than steadily, reflecting in-
creased interest. Years ago, the term “sociology” was carrying a negative
connotation in hard-science circles where only bibliometric counts were
barely accepted. As exemplified by the above diversification, the overall
approach has now evolved and matured.
The last paragraphs of OSA 6’s and OSA 7’s Forewords state eloquently
the timeliness of dealing with strategical and organizational issues, insisting
on the need of pursuing such publishing and related activities.

A Matter of Communication
Astronomy-related art is one of the facets participating to the general com-
munication process and can be an excellent vector. Four examples, among
many, of astronomy in contemporaneous art are illustrating this editorial.
See the legends for specific comments3 .
Astronomy communication has of course many other important faces,
be it at the intra-professional level or towards the society at large (see e.g.
Heck & Madsen 2003). The theme has been a recurrent one in the OSA
series, including in this seventh volume.
Here is a follow-up to some of the communication-related points raised
in OSA 6’s Editorial:
– the proceedings of the CAP 2005 conference, organized by the IAU Work-
ing Group on Communicating Astronomy with the Public 4 (see Robson
2006, this volume) are now available (Robson & Christensen 20055 ); the
next such gathering, CAP 2007, is currently under consideration for Au-
tumn 2007 in Hawaii, USA;
– after its 2005 national conference on the theme Building Community: The
Emerging EPO 6 Profession, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP)
stays on that line with the next one: Engaging the EPO Community: Best
Practices, New Approaches (Baltimore, September 2006)7 ;
3
OSA chapters have been dedicated to the conferences on The Inspiration of Astro-
nomical Phenomena (INSAP): by Ray E. White in OSA 1 (2000) and by Marvin Bolt
in OSA 7 (2006, this volume). Refer also to a survey on creativity (Heck 2001/OSA 2)
and to a chapter (with CD) by Noël Cramer (2004/OSA 5) on Czech-born space artist
Ludek Pesek. Several art pieces were reproduced in OSA 4’s and OSA 6’s Editorials.
4
http://www.communicatingastronomy.org/cap2005
5
http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/further information/books/pdf/cap2005
proceedings.pdf
6
EPO = Education and Public Outreach.
7
http://www.astrosociety.org/events/meeting.html