The business session for Commission 37 was held on 11 August 2009 at the IAU General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting was attended by about a dozen members of our Comission, including President Elmegreen, VP Carraro and several committee members. We introduced ourselves and then went through a powerpoint presentation first prepared by outgoing President Hatzidimitriou and revised by incoming President Elmegreen. The contents of the powerpoint presentation are given in this summary.

The business meeting of Division VIII was held on 12 August 2009 14:00-15:00 in room R2.6 together with the business meeting of Commissions 28 and 47.

Division IX provides a forum for astronomers engaged in the planning, development, construction, and calibration of optical and infrared telescopes and instrumentation, as well as observational procedures including data processing. A few years ago, discussions were started about changes in the structure of Division IX, with the aim of bringing it more in line with today's world of large coordinated projects and multi-national observatories. The course of this process, and further steps to be taken in the period from 2009 to 2012, were at the focus of the deliberations at the business meeting of Division IX at the IAU General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro.

The Business Meeting for Commission 25 was held on the 6th of August 2009. The meeting was chaired by Dr Eugene Milone, Vice President for the 2006-2009 triennium, and incoming President for the 2009-2011 triennium. Dr Milone presented an apology from the President of the Commission, Dr Peter Martinez, who was unable to attend the meeting.

The formal origin of the IRWG occured at the Buenos Aires General Assembly, following a Joint Commission meeting at the IAU GA in Baltimore in 1988 that identified the problems with ground-based infrared photometry. The situation is summarized in Milone (1989). In short, the challenges involved how to explain the failure to achieve the milli-magnitude precision expected of infrared photometry and an apparent 3% limit on system transformability. The proposed solution was to redefine the broadband Johnson system, the passbands of which had proven so unsatisfactory that over time effectively different systems proliferated, although bearing the same JHKLMNQ designations; the new system needed to be better positioned and centered in the atmospheric windows of the Earth's atmosphere, and the variable water vapour content of the atmosphere needed to be measured in real time to better correct for atmospheric extinction.

The meeting was unfortunately scheduled for the afternoon of the last day of the General Assembly, so attendance was low. Nevertheless, we had some good discussions.

Commission 54 held its business meeting on 11 August 2009 at “Botequim” at Rua Visconde de Caravelas 184/186, Humaitá, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro. Individual members in attendance reported on activities of relevance to C54.

The work of this group is well covered in the report on Special Session 3 given in “Highlights of Astronomy 15”, to be published by CUP in 2010.

The business meeting of Division X in the IAU 2009GA took place in three sessions during the day of August 6, 2009. The meeting, being well attended, started with the approval for the meeting agenda. Then the triennium reports were made in the first session by the president of Division X, Ren-Dong Nan, and by the chairs of three working groups: “Historic Radio Astronomy WG” by Wayne Orchiston, “Astrophysically Important Lines WG” by Masatoshi Ohishi, and “Global VLBI WG” by Tasso Tzioumis (proxy chair appointed by Steven Tingay). Afterwards, a dozen reports from observatories and worldwide significant projects have been presented in the second session. Business meeting of “Interference Mitigation WG” was located in the third session.

The IAU Working Group on Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) Mitigation was setup in the 2000 IAU GA in Manchester and its mandate was renewed at subsequent IAU GAs in 2003 and 2006. It was noted that that there are important issues related to RFI mitigation that extend beyond the regulatory function of IUCAF, and hence a more extended working group, which may include IUCAF members, was established.

During the Rio General Assembly we held the following meetings of the Working Group: a Business Meeting, a Science Meeting on “The Development of Aperture Synthesis Imaging in Radio Astronomy”, and a Science Meeting on “Recent Research”.

Brief meetings were held to confirm the elections of the incoming Division President, Francoise Genova and Vice President, Ray Norris along with the Organizing Committee which will consist of the incoming Presidents of the 7 Commissions (5,6,14,41,46,50 and 55) plus additional nominated members. The incoming Organizing Committee will thus consist of:

Commission 5 and its working groups have continued to operate at a high level of activity over the last three years. In an era when the volume of astronomical data generated by next-generation instruments continues to increase dramatically, and data centres and data tools become increasingly central to front-line astronomical research, the activities of Commission 5 are becoming even more significant. However, most of the activities of Commission 5 take place through its working groups. That was reflected in the meetings at the IAU GA, where there was only one short Business Meeting of the Commission as a whole, but several vigorous meetings of the working groups.

The President verbally reported that the only scientific matter that he dealt with during the triennium as an appeal over the withholding of a supernova designation from an object observed only in the infra-red with no supporting spectrum.

The Business Meeting of Commission 41 was held in Sessions 2 on 5 August 2009, with Acting President Clive Ruggles (UK) in the Chair. He called for a moment of silence for those members who had passed away in the last triennium, including Prof. Xi Zezong (b. 1927, d. 2008 Dec 27) and Prof. Chen Meidong (b. 1936, d. 2008 Dec 30).

What follows is a short report on the Business Meeting of the Astronomy and World Heritage Working Group held on Thursday August 6, 2009. This was the first formal Business Meeting of the Working Group since its formation following the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between the IAU and UNESCO on Astronomy and World Heritage in October 2008.

Commission 46 had held two sessions of business meetings during the General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro. Both of them were chaired by Magda Stavinschi.

The past President of Division XII, Malcolm Smith, took the chair of the business meeting of C50, in the absence of the past President of C50, Richard Wainscoat. He described the procedure of the election in 2006 of the then-time vice-president of C50, Richard Wainscoat, as President of C50, after the untimely deatch of the then-time C50 President, Hugo Schwarz. He also described the procedure for electing the incoming OC members and officers.