The “Science with SALT” meeting in March 1998 opened avenues of cooperation between SAAO and the University of Texas at Austin in education and public outreach. This paper will review past interactions and future plans. SAAO personnel have visited the HET and McDonald Observatory and have taken part in planning meetings for the Texas Astronomy Education Center museum area and educational programming. Discussions concerning the extension of the daily radio show StarDate (English), Universo (Spanish) and Sternzeit (German) versions to a southern hemisphere version are underway. In addition, we are cooperatively planning a workshop to discuss an international collaborative for educational outreach for state-of-the-art telescopes for which a regional collaborative in southwestern U.S. (SCOPE) serves as a model. The towns of Sutherland and Fort Davis are discussing forming a “twin-town” relationship. Projects and plans that link cutting-edge astronomical research to classrooms and the public will be reviewed.

Division IV organises astronomers studying the characterisation, interior and atmospheric structure, and evolution of stars of all masses, ages, and chemical compositions. The Executive Committee of the Division comprises the Presidents of the Five Commissions of the Division, and the Past Division President.

One of the main tasks of the Division is to advise the Executive Committee of the IAU on meetings proposed by members of the IAU. Members wishing to seek IAU support for proposed scientific meetings should follow the IAU rules for such meetings.

Promotion of astronomy in Arab countries is facing many scientific and technical problems. Teaching astronomy starts very late in schools, with very simple and limited courses. Many teachers lack a suitable astronomical background, which can lead to incorrect understanding by students of many astronomical ideas and phenomena. Teaching astronomy at higher levels is also very limited, for example: aomng the 16 universities in Egypt, astronomy is taught in only two faculties of science, just for two years. Graduate students find many difficulties in obtaining jobs related to astronomical activities and this is a serious limitation on the attraction of the study of astronomy. On the other hand, astronomical institutions are suffering from a serious lack of the new sophisticated equipment, while the budget allotted for maintenance is very small, and there is a serious shortage of technical staff. The training of astronomers and technicians is badly needed, since good research work depends on modern technological equipment and the complicated software packages used in controlling such equipment and in data analysis. Good libraries are needed for promotion of astronomy especially, the Internet facilities available for the staff is very limited. The effects of culture are very clear; many authorities in developing countries believe that astronomy is a luxury. Finally, most of astronomers are engaged with a lot of administration for all matters, so the free time left for science is very limited.

The Working Group on Hot Massive Stars has been officially recognized by the IAU Executive Committee during the XXIII General Assembly in August 1997. Its origins are the Hot Star Newsletter, launched in 1994, and a long tradition of interaction and collaborative research strengthened by a series of meetings on hot beaches. It gathers over 500 researchers working on OB stars, Luminous Blue Variables, Wolf-Rayet stars, and in general all topics related to the evolution of massive stars and to the physics and consequences of winds from hot stars. The very successful recent symposium on “Wolf-Rayet phenomena in massive stars and starburst galaxies” is an indicator of the increasing interest of the extragalactic community in the study of these extraordinary stars.

This triennial report (1996-1999) reviews the subject from a somewhat personal angle, mostly related to binary star formation and young binary star populations – a subject whose time had come in the early 1990s and is now in full swing.

Many astronomers have searched for binary systems among main-sequence stars, and two large-scale surveys published in 1991 and 1992 have already become classics. Well before they became famous for finding extrasolar planets (see below), observing teams led by Michel Mayor (Geneva Observatory) and Geoffrey Marcy (San Francisco State Univ., now Univ. of Calif, at Berkeley) spent many years searching for low-mass stellar companions of nearby stars. The late Antoine Duquennoy and Mayor surveyed all solar-type dwarfs (spectral types F7 through G9) within 20 pc of the Sun, while Debra Fischer and Marcy studied stars with somewhat lower mass (M dwarfs) slightly nearer to the Sun.

In recent years, a daily increasing movement of non-professional astronomers has become the center of development for astronomy, a subject practically absent now from the national education system in Cuba. A key role in this movement has been played by the professional staff of the Department of Astronomy of the Institute of Geophysics and Astronomy. A direct outcome of this joint effort with amateurs is the research on meteors and comets, presented at two national and one international scientific meeetings.

With an increasing wealth of data and analyses, as well as growing new areas of interest (such as spectral profiles for the search of extrasolar planets), it is no longer possible to present a comprehensive review on the area of Stellar Spectroscopy. As already stressed by the two predecessors as presidents of this Commission, Drs. D.L. Lambert and M.S. Bessell, the Astronomy & Astrophysics Abstracts and Institute for Scientific Information, NASA-ADS, Simbad databases, NIST spectroscopic database, among others, imply that these IAU reviews can now be seen as a guide to the field, presenting a survey of a variety of topics, providing no thorough coverage on each of them. A partial list of Proceedings, including topics related to Commission 29, is provided below.

Throughout the last three millennia the area of Jordan, as part of the Arab World, has a rich history in the foundation and development of astronomy. Jordan today is pro-active in developing community programmes of education. I will describe the outreach programmes and community participation that I experienced during my attendence in Jordan at a conference timed to coincide with the Leonid Meteor Storm of November 1999.

Spurred by the leaping developments of research activities (SMA, TAOS, AMIBA), Taiwan is catching up in virtually all aspects of its education in astronomy. The first astronomy research institute was established by the Academia Sinica about 10 years ago, which catalyzed within two years the first graduate school of astronomy, as well as an elaborate astronomy museum. Since then astronomy education at all levels, from colleges to primary schools, has been booming. More than a dozen universities are offering astronomy courses, and two more graduate schools will soon be instituted. Textbooks get written, and books on popular science, either translated or composed by local authors, have mushroomed on the market. I will outline these ongoing activities along with plans on the horizon.

Our Commission decided to proceed as before, with a rather comprehensive report, while focusing on the subjects where most progress has been achieved during the past three years. The colleagues who kindly contributed to it are W. Dziembowski (helio- and aster-oseismology), J. Guzik (intermediate-mass stars), G. Meynet (massive stars), G. Michaud (atomic diffusion), D. VandenBerg (low mass stars), G. Vauclair (white dwarfs), J.-P. Zahn (convection, rotational mixing).

General

The programme of scientific meetings is one of the most important means by which the IAU pursues its goal of promoting the science of astronomy through international collaboration. A large fraction of the Union’s budget is devoted to the support of the IAU scientific meetings. The Executive Committee (EC) places great emphasis on maintaining high scientific standards, coverage of a balanced spectrum of subjects, and an appropriately international flavour for the programme of meetings sponsored by the IAU.

I describe an interactive unit for teaching/learning planetary orbits at secondary level. The unit consists of a pre-test, activites related to the planetary orbits and a post-test. The pre-test is designed to modulate the activities to suit the needs of the students. The activities are (1) Trajectory of a particle in a gravitational field when the field is constant, and when it varies with distance (invoking a fictitious planet WonderX); (2) Plotting the orbit of a planet round the sun starting from select initial conditions and discovering Kepler’s laws; (3) Plotting orbits with force laws containing terms like 1/r3 and 1/r4 and discovering precession. Students work through graded steps. To help them, simple numerical algorithms and computer programs have been developed as they are not yet comfortable with calculus. A post-test gauges the progress of the students for a possible revisit to the topic. Such units can be very effective in teaching basic astronomy in developing countries.

Consistently with a trend observed in recent past triennial reports, progress in the theory of stellar atmospheres continues to be made in two different directions: 1) the traditional areas of continuum and line radiation transfer, line blanketing, atomic physics and atmospheric structures controlled by the joint conditions of radiative and hydrostatic equilibrium, and 2) in areas of emerging interest such as oscillations, velocity fields, winds and mass loss, chromospheres, coronae and magnetic phenomena. Particular attention is devoted also to the accurate determination of stellar elemental abundances and their implications for stellar interior structure and evolution as well as for the chemical enrichment of the Galaxy.

This report does not intend to give a complete review of all the papers that appeared since the previous General Assembly but to focus on a few subjects only.