The Virtual Observatory is one of the very few truly global endeavours of astronomy, and IAU General Assemblies are the natural places to present the VO to the community. The three-year time scale of IAU is also well suited to measure progress. At the IAU XXV GA in Sydney, 2003, half of the two-day Joint Discussion 8 on Large Telescopes & Virtual Observatories: Visions for the Future was devoted to VO talks: the main goal was to review what was expected from the VO in different disciplines of astronomy; many projects were also presented in the poster sessions. This time the three-day VO Special Session has given an excellent overview of present status of the VO, showing both tremendous progress and the work which remains to be done. Several scientific communities (astronomy, solar and heliospheric physics) are working on VO development, national communities have been organizing themselves in VO projects. Implementation by data centres has begun. Additional technical development is required, and there are still technical challenges. There is also a huge work ahead for providing high quality data and services, but the VO development already has a very positive influence on astronomers' work environment, and more is to come.

The International Astronomical Union has a strong commitment to the development of astronomical education and research throughout the world, especially in those countries developing economically. This commitment is in part through the work of IAU Commission 46 for astronomy education and development. Within that commission, the Program Group for the World-wide Development of Astronomy (PGWWDA) coordinates many of these activities, promoting the development of astronomy in developing countries.

We present a summary of the major contributions to the Special Session on Astronomical Data Management held at the IAU XXVI General Assembly in Prague in 2006. While recent years have seen enormous improvements in access to astronomical data, and the Virtual Observatory aims to provide astronomers with seamless access to on-line resources, more attention needs to be paid to ensuring the quality and completeness of those resources. For example, data produced by telescopes are not always made available to the astronomical community, and new instruments are sometimes designed and built with insufficient planning for data management, while older but valuable legacy data often remain undigitised. Data and results published in journals do not always appear in the data centres, and astronomers in developing countries sometimes have inadequate access to on-line resources. To address these issues, an ‘Astronomers' Data Manifesto’ has been formulated with the aim of initiating a discussion that will lead to the development of a ‘code of best practice’ in astronomical data management.

The high, dry and stable climatic conditions on top of the Antarctic plateau offer exceptional conditions for a wide range of observational astronomy, from optical to millimetre wavelengths. This is principally on account of the greatly reduced thermal backgrounds, the improved atmospheric transmission and the supurb seeing, in comparison with conditions at temperate latitude sites. The polar plateaus in the Arctic may also offer excellent conditions for astronomy, though these have yet to be quantified. We briefly review the history of astronomy in Antarctica and outline some of the activities now taking place on the polar plateaus, and plans for the future.

Beginning with the winter season of 1995 and for the next ten years, the Antarctic Sub-mm Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST/RO, Stark et al. 1997; Stark et al. 2001; <http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/ASTRO/>), a 1.7m diameter, offset Gregorian telescope located at an altitude of 2847m at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station collected sub-mm and Terahertz data in the 1.3mm to 200μm wavelength bands. From its location just a few hundred meters away from the geophysical South Pole, AST/RO was the first sub-mm telescope to over-winter on the polar plateau, a location uniquely suited to high quality sub-mm observations due its very low humidity, high atmospheric stability and thin troposphere (Chamberlin et al. 1997).

The AMANDA neutrino telescope, prototype instrument of the IceCube neutrino observatory at South Pole, has collected data since 2000 in its final configuration. A period of 1001 days of livetime between 2000 and 2004 has been analysed in order to find evidence of a neutrino signal coming from point-like sources such as microquasars, active galactic nuclei, supernovae remnants or gamma ray bursts. A sensitivity to fluxes of νμ + νμ + ντ + ντ of dΦ/dE =1.0 · 10−10 (E/TeV)−2 · TeV−1 cm−2 s−1 was reached in the energy range between 1.6 TeV and 1.6 PeV. No significant excess over the background has been found so far. Flux upper limits infered from this study can constrain certain neutrino emission models of X-ray binaries. IceCube will have a substantially higher sensitivity. Currently at 10% of its final extension, it will comprise 4800 optical sensors deployed along 80 strings by early 2011, instrumenting one cubic kilometre volume of ice and 1 km2 at the surface.

The idea of starting an astronomical site testing in Antarctica began during a congress organized by French Académie des Sciences, in 1992, and entitled ‘Recherches polaires-Une Stratégie pour l'an 2000’. At this time, one of us (Vernin 1994) gave a proposal for an astronomical site testing in Antarctica. This proposal was rapidly followed by a meeting between Al Harper (from ‘Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica’, Chicago), Peter Gillingham (from the Anglo Australian Observatory, Australia) and Jean Vernin (from Nice University) at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in 1993. It was decided to investigate what was the astronomical quality of South Pole station, each institute bringing its own participation: CARA, the South Pole infrastructure, University of New South Wales, a PhD student and Nice University its expertise and instruments.

In the recent years, a lot of instruments have been put into operation during the polar summer at DômeC., Then, during the first polar night when the Astro-Concordia sation was open for the first time during winter, about 40 balloons (Azouit & Vernin) instrumented to measure optical turbulence profiles and 2 Differencial Image Motion Monitors (DIMM) were setup. The main results from this first important campaign are found in Agabi et al. (2006). It appears from this first night time observations that almost all the optical turbulence was concentrated in the first 30 m above the ice. At an elevation of 8.5 m above the ice the seeing is about 1″.4, while above an elevation of 30 m the seeing drops down to 0″.36. This last figure is coherent with the estimation from Lawrence et al. (2004) if one takes into account that they were not sensitive to the first 30 m., which corresponds to the turbulent surface layer.

Dome C, Antarctica is a prime site for astronomical observations in terms of climate, wind speeds, turbulence, and infrared and terahertz sky backgrounds (for example, see Aristidi et al. 2005; Storey et al. 2005). However, at present little is known about the optical sky brightness and atmospheric extinction. Using a variety of modelling techniques, together with data from the South Pole, the brightness of the night sky at Dome C is estimated in Kenyon & Storey (2006) including the contributions from scattered sunlight, moonlight, aurorae, airglow, zodiacal light, integrated starlight, diffuse Galactic light and artificial sources. The results are compared to Mauna Kea, Hawaii. We summarise the main conclusions.

Dome C, Antarctica is one of the most promising astronomical sites in the world (Fossat & Candidi 2003, and references therein). Dome C boasts low wind speeds, very cold temperatures and little precipitation. The atmospheric turbulence is very weak compared to temperate sites, leading to sub-arcsecond seeing conditions (Lawrence et al. 2004; Agabi et al. 2006).

Amica (Antarctic Multiband Infrared Camera) is a dual-channel Infrared Imager (2-28μm), that will be located at the Nasmyth focus of the IRAIT telescope at Dome C. Dome C base, on Antarctic plateau offers an unique chance for infrared astronomy. It has several advantages like temperature, pressure and site environment. Temperature, around –60°C (mean) allows a good atmospheric stability (good seeing and good windows transparency) a low atmospheric background and the reduction of instrumental background. Pressure (equivalent of 4000 m a.s.l.), implies low content of water vapors; this means higher transmission, broader and new astronomical windows. The site offers the possibility of very long observations (about 6 months winter night).

The IRAIT (International Robotic Antarctic Infrared Telescope) project (Tosti et al. 2006) is based on a 80 cm aperture telescope to observe in the infrared range. It is due to start operations in spring 2008, several months after installation in Dome C (Antarctica). We describe the contributions made to such project by the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) and the University of Granada, whose participation has been mainly focused in developing the moving optical system for the secondary (M2) and tertiary (M3) mirrors of the telescope. Moving parts of the optical system provide focusing and chopping capabilities, implemented in M2, and a rotation mechanism, implemented in M3, allow observation in either Nasmyth foci. The work package includes the design and construction of both mirrors, the mechanical supports, the electronics and the control software, all prepared to work at the low temperatures at Antarctica. A Spanish company, NTE, was contracted to carry out the design and manufacture. Tests at low temperature and integration in the telescope were finished during summer 2006, before sending the telescope to Antarctica, scheduled by the end of the same year.

The next generation (post-VLTI) of multi-telescope interferometric arrays operated in optical/infrared wavelengths should be kilometric, from 1 to 10 km. The Concordia station offers a unique opportunity to set such an interferometer in the best atmospheric conditions presently known on Earth.

DS or Integral-Field Spectroscopy (IFS) provides multiple spectra for each point of a 2-D field, rather than along a narrow, 1-D spectrograph slit only. Therefore, IFS does not require very accurate telescope pointing, nor do pre-assumptions about slit or aperture sizes have to be made. It avoids any ‘slit-losses’ due to seeing or atmospheric dispersion, which eliminates the need for any parallactic alignment or a dispersion compensator (see Fig. 1).

Submillimetre (submm) astronomy is the prime technique to unveil the birth and early evolution of a broad range of astrophysical objects. It is a relatively new branch of observational astrophysics which focuses on studies of the cold Universe, i.e., objects radiating a significant – if not dominant – fraction of their energy at wavelengths ranging from ∼ 100 μm to ∼ 1 mm. Submm continuum observations are particularly powerful to measure the luminosities, temperatures and masses of cold dust emitting objects. Examples of such objects include star-forming clouds in our Galaxy, prestellar cores and deeply embedded protostars, protoplanetary disks around young stars, as well as nearby starburst galaxies and dust-enshrouded high-redshift galaxies in the early Universe.

The search for life in extraterrestrial planets is to be tested first with the only planet known to shelter life. If the planet Earth is used as an example to search for a signature of life, the vegetation is one of its possible detectable signature, using the Vegetation Red Edge due to chlorophyll in the near infrared (0.725 μm). We focus on the test of the detectability of vegetation in the spectrum of Earth seen as a simple dot, using the reflection of the global Earth on the lunar surface, i.e., Earthshine. On the Antartic, the Earthshine can be seen during several hours in a day (not possible at our latitudes) and so variations due to different parts of Earth, that is to say oceans and continents facing the Moon could be detected.