This Division IV was started on a trial basis at the General Assembly in The Hague 1994 and was formally accepted at the Kyoto General Assembly in 1997. Its broad coverage of “Stars” is reflected in its relatively large number of Commissions and so of members (1266 in late 2011). Its kindred Division V, “Variable Stars”, has the same history of its beginning. The thinking at the time was to achieve some kind of balance between the number of members in each of the 12 Divisions. Amid the current discussion of reorganizing the number of Divisions into a more compact form it seems advisable to make this numerical balance less of an issue than the rationalization of the scientific coverage of each Division, so providing more effective interaction within a particular field of astronomy. After all, every star is variable to a certain degree and such variability is becoming an ever more powerful tool to understand the characteristics of every kind of normal and peculiar star. So we may expect, after hearing the reactions of members, that in the restructuring a single Division will result from the current Divisions IV and V.