The past year has produced some of the most exciting results in the history of astronomy, particularly in the area of planets outside our solar system. Only a half-year before our meeting in Toledo, Spain, the first unambiguous detection of planet-sized masses orbiting main sequence stars were reported. Since that time, evidence for a new exo planet has been reported almost at the rate of about once per month. Some of these objects are likely to turn out to be very low-mass stars, but something like half show characteristics - Jupiter-like mass and near-zero orbital eccentricity - which appear to be unique to planets. Almost at the same time that giant planets were being discovered regularly, the two major space agencies, ESA and NASA, have iden tified searches for and detailed study of Earth-like planets as a major priority for the future. In ESA's "Horizon 2000 Plus" programme, an infrared interferometer has been proposed as a possible future Cor nerstone mission. Similarly, scientists in the US produced the "Road Map for the Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems (ExNPS)", which provided NASA with a long-term plan which leads also to an infrared interferometer in space to study hypothetical Earth-like worlds beyond our Solar System. Such an observatory is designed to search for the thermal emission from a family of planets, using interferometric nulling to remove the contaminating light from the central star.

The proceedings of the March 1996 workshop present 40 papers by scientists and engineers from both sides of the Atlantic, discussing the technological challenges of an infrared space interferometer and its scientific capabilities, particularly those related to exo- planetary systems and Earth-like planets. Topics include infrared observations of planetary atmospheres; detection of planets via microlensing; evolution and spectra of extrasolar giant planets; life signatures on exoplanets; advances in satellite data compression and noise-filtering by virtue of parallel computing; and the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope (COAST) project. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The successful launch on November 17, 1995 of ESA's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) by means of an Ariane 4 carrier, has set in motion a true revolution in quantitative infrared astronomy. For the first time since the very successful IRAS mission in 1983, the astronomical community has uninterrupted access to the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The four focal plane instruments on board of ISO ( the camera ISOCAM, the photometerjcamera ISOPHOT, and the short and long wavelength spec trographs ISO-SWS and ISO-LWS), perform very well and live up to the high expectations all of us had at launch. In the spring of 1996, Thijs de Graauw (principal investigator of the SWS) first suggested the idea to organize a conference dedicated to ISO re sults in the area of stars and circumstellar matter, and coined the title ISO 's View on Stellar Evolution. At the first scientific meeting to highlight some of the early ISO results which was held in May of 1996 at ESA's laboratory ESTEC in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the conference was announced and a preliminary science organizing committee was formed. The conference was held from July 1 to 4, 1997, in conference centre de Leeuwenhorst, Noord wijkerhout, the Netherlands. The conference was opened by the Director of ESA 's Science Programme, Professor R. Bonnet.

First comprehensive, beginning graduate level book on the emergent science of astrobiology.

Comet Hale-Bopp defines a milestone event for cometary science: it is the first "really big" comet observed with modern equipment on the ground and from space and due to that; it is considered the new reference object in cometary sciences. At the beginning of a new era in spacecraft exploration of comets and five years after Hale-Bopp's perihelion passage these proceedings of invited and contributed papers for IAU Colloquium 186 "Cometary Science after Hale-Bopp" review the state-of-the-art knowledge on comets, the icy, dusty and most primordial left-overs of the formation disk of our own solar system. This is the first volume with invited review papers. A second volume with contributed papers is published in ISBN 1-4020-0978-X.