The Working Group of the European Association for Astronomy Education responsible for Teacher Training organises an annual Summer School for teachers under expert guidance. For a week the teachers participating can exchange experiences, increase their knowledge and discuss different ideas and perspectives.

In general, the instructors are professional astronomers, professors and teachers from different countries. The papers presented offer very practical activities, paying special attention to didactic aspects, and take the form of general lectures to all 40 participants and workshops to reduced groups of 20 participants. There are also day and night observations, without expensive equipment or complicated procedures, that are easy to set up and based on topics that it is possible to use in the classroom.

The Summer Schools promote a scientific astronomical education at all levels of astronomy teaching, reinforce the link between professional astronomers and teachers with experience of teaching astronomy, allow debates among the participants on their pedagogical activities already carried out in their own classroom and help them to organise activities outside it.

Astronomy teachers need special training, access to specific research, to new educational materials and methods and the opportunity to exchange experiences. All these things are provided by the Summer School.

This report includes some of the major achievements in studies of planets and satellites that have been made during the past three years.

Total solar eclipses will cross southern Africa on June 21, 2001, and on December 4, 2002. Most of Africa will see partial phases. The total phase of the 2001 eclipse will be visible from parts of Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Madagascar. The total phase of the 2002 eclipse will be visible from parts of Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique. Public education must be undertaken to tell the people how to look at the eclipse safely. We can take advantage of having the attention of the people and of news media to teach about not only eclipses but also the rest of astronomy. I am Chair of a “Public Education at Eclipses” subcommission of IAU Commission 46 on the Teaching of Astronomy, and we are able to advise educators and others about materials, procedures and information releases.

The full potential of television for education has not been used in developing nations. It is relatively inexpensive to produce astronomy programs that can be broadcast taking advantage of satellite transmissions.

We suggest that these programs should have the following elements in order to be efficient:

1. 1 Be in the local language.

2. 2 Be short enough so that the teacher has a chance to comment on them during a one-hour lecture.

3. 3 Show experiments specially if they are meant for schools that do not have laboratory facilities.

4. 4 Be produced for several educational levels, including programs aimed for teacher training.

Inexpensive books should be edited in the local language in order to serve as an educational complement to the television series.

This Comm. 20 triennial report is prepared as a short summary of the scientific progress in the fields of interest, where, by necessity, only a few highlights are to be mentioned. On the Comm. 20 webpage, the interested reader may find a more complete list of recent references to the relevant literature. Its URL at the time of writing (October 1999) is www.astro.uu.se/IAU/c20/, but mirror sites are expected to have been set up at the time of appearance of these Transactions.

Division X provides a common theme for astronomers using radio techniques to study a vast range of phenomena in the Universe, from exploring the Earth’s ionosphere or making radar measurements in the solar system, via mapping the distribution of gas and molecules in our own and other galaxies, to the study of previous vast explosive processes in radio galaxies and QSOs and the faint afterglow of the Big Bang itself.

During the period from July 1996 to Dec 1998, 189 photographic positions of the galilean satellites were obtained with the zonal astrograph (D=120 mm, F=2044mm). In the year 1998 the close approach of the satellite system with the star N 117881 from the HIPPARCOS catalogue was observed. The observations of 1996 were processed using PPM catalogue and the observations of 1997, 1998 in the ICRS using HIPPARCOS and ACTRC star catalogues. The results are not yet published, but are available upon request. Observations made since 1962 up to 1996 with the zonal astrograph were reprocessed and results are in preparation for publication. During the period from 1996 to 1998, 69 positions of the Galilean satellites were determined by photoelectric meridian observations with the Repsold meridian circle equipped by CCD-microscopes (F=2150 mm, D=150 mm).

Two seemingly incongruous components have come together about every two years: the serene terraces of the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, and the noisy exuberance of 25 beginning-level graduate students. Add in a small faculty of first-rate professors and a resourceful local support team, and one has the ingredients for the month-long Vatican Observatory Summer Schools. The eighth School takes place in the summer of 2001, and its goals are the same as when the series started in 1986: to encourage and motivate a mix of young people from industrialized and developing countries who are at critical moments of their research careers, and to make a small, but significant contribution to the progress of developing countries by exposing some of their most talented young citizens to people involved in high quality research in astrophysics. This account outlines the nature of the Schools, their follow-up, and something of how the spirit of sharing of personal and institutional resources is achieved.

A brief review of the issues affecting the current status of science education in general, and astronomy education in particular, is given. The paper looks at the present situation at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. South Africa has unique educational problems and the initiatives by local observatories and universities at school level are described. The problems encountered by the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) Science Education Initiative (SEI) are typical, as is the SEI approach to addressing some of these. The experience of the SEI is described, as are some of the resources developed by them for primary and secondary schools. Finally a brief look is taken at future developments, in particular, ways in which the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) can contribute to astronomy and science education.

It has been known that non spherical silicate particles of a size comparable to the wavelength of light, and aggregates of such particles, produce negative polarization in the backscattering region (e.g. Xing & Hanner 1997, Yanamandra-Fisher & Hanner, 1999). It has now been shown that large aggregates of small absorbing particles of fractal dimension about 2 produce a slightly negative polarization at small phase angles (Levasseur-Regourd et al., 1997). The phase-curves strongly differ from those of Mie spheroidal particles. They are likely to be due to scattering by irregular dust particles and/or fluffy aggregates of numerous submicronic absorbing particles (Levasseur-Regourd et al., 1997; Lumme et al., 1997).

The IAU Meteor Data Centre (MDC), maintained at Lund, Sweden, under the direction of Bertil Lindblad, remains a valuable resource for the meteor community. Commission 22 currently has representatives on two inter-commission Working Groups, The Prevention of Interplanetary Pollution (Chair C. S. L. Keay of Commission 22) and Near-Earth Objects (IAU C22 representative I.P. Williams). The Commission has one Working Group of its own, Amateur-Professional Co-operation in Meteors, consisting of P. Jenniskens (Chair), H. Betlem, N. Bone, P. Brown, T. Cooper, I. Hasegawa, R. Hawkes, G. Klar-Renner, V. Porubčan, J. Rendtel, J. Richardson, T. Yoshida. Meetings of the working group were held in Japan in Aug 1997 and in Ithaca, NY in Jul 1999, and circulated periodic electronic newsletters. The working group helped establish professional-amateur collaborations during the Leonid campaigns of November 1998 and 1999, facilitated amateur participation in NASA’s Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign, and encouraged publication of amateur observations. The IAU Commission 22 www site has the following new location: http://www.mta.ca/rhawkes/IAU22.

Distance education and self-study are defined and described and their possible application to developing countries is discussed.

Professor Colomb resigned as President of the Commission because of pressing demands of work. The Organizing Committee appointed Stuart Bowyer (Vice President) as Acting President.

The Commission has proposed changing its name to “Bioastronomy: Search for Extrasolar Planets and Extraterrestial Life” to reflect our long-standing involvement in the search for extrasolar planets. The name change is pending approval of the IAU.

Any worthwhile tertiary-level course of study should, as its highest priority, reflect the discipline it represents as it is contemporaneously practiced. Were it not to do so, students would be intellectually underprovided. This paper sets out general principles which a first degree-level course in astronomy should aim to provide for its students. No specific syllabi will be attempted but, rather, the paper will outline ranges of topics and their level of treatment. While all students taking such courses should have as professional experience as possible, it must be recognised that most students taking tertiary-level astronomy courses may not become professional astronomers and that such courses will necessarily have to have flexibility to meet local circumstances.