In April 1967 the British and Australian Governments agreed jointly to build and operate a 150-inch (3.8m) optical telescope on Siding Spring Mountain, 16 miles west of Coonabarabran, N.S.W., where the Australian National University has an established observatory. To direct the construction and subsequent operation of the new telescope it was decided to create a statutory authority to be known as the Anglo-Australian Telescope Board. Pending the formation of this board, the two Governments, acting through the Department of Education and Science in Canberra and the Science Research Council in London, set up a joint policy committee to initiate the project.

If there were no solar magnetic fields, then the most active feature observable on the Sun would be the hydrodynamic convection. There would be no sunspots, flares, prominences, plage, spicules, and no copious emissions of X-rays, energetic particles or radio bursts. These effects are all due to the presence of a changing pattern of magnetic fields which repeats every 22 years. While observations of electromagnetic phenomena are limited to the solar surface and atmosphere, a full understanding of these effects must include a satisfactory theory of the solar cycle and of the fields which evolve beneath the surface as a result of plasma velocity fields.

The subject of extraterrestrial civilizations is relevant to astronomy in two ways. Firstly, the very existence of life outside Earth is dependent upon the picture that astronomers can draw of the Universe, and we will see how that picture allows us to be very optimistic. Then, if we think that there are intelligent beings in space, the detection of signals from them is an astronomical problem, and we will see that it most probably concerns radio astronomers.

Until the last six years few infrared observations of astronomical objects (other than the Sun and planets) had been attempted. Those few were primarily concerned with obtaining bolometric corrections and effective temperatures, the variation of bolometric magnitudes of late-type variables, and the derivation of the laws of interstellar extinction.

As the night sky near Canberra grows brighter each year, many of the traditional areas of investigation at Mount Stromlo are suffering, and work in these fields is shifting to Siding Spring Mountain, near Coonabarabran, N.S.W. One of several projects designed to ensure the continued productivity of the 74-inch reflector at Mount Stromlo as conditions change has been the installation of an échelle grating system in the coudé focus of the telescope. This will allow very high dispersion work on bright stars, and should be littles affected by nearby city lights.

The paraboloid primary mirror of a classical reflecting telescope gives an image that is perfectly corrected for spherical aberration and free from chromatic aberration. However, the image suffers from coma, astigmatism and field curvature. These aberrations severely limit the usable field. For example, the primary mirror of the 200 inch telescope gives an acceptable image of a field with a diameter of only ~2’ arc.

The existence of red supergiants such as those in the clusters h and χ Persei has puzzled stellar evolution theoreticians for some time. Suggested explanations for them have included stars in a stage of gravitational contraction to the main sequence, or between nuclear burnings, core helium burning stars, and stars burning carbon or oxygen in the core, but it is now generally accepted that most red supergiants are core helium burning stars.

Observations of the red giants in NGC 1866 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, made by Arp and Thackeray provide a strict test for core helium burning models of about 5M⊙. The main observational features to be reproduced theoretically are the luminosity of the red giants, the range in effective temperature that they occupy and the ratio of the number of giants near the blue end of this range to the number at the bottom of the red giant branch. Meyer-Hofmeister attempted a theoretical fit to these observations using the initial (X, Y, Z) composition (0.602, 0.354, 0.044) and assuming the stars to have formed uniformly over a period of 1.5 × 107 years about a mean age of 5.75 × 107 years. Although she was able to fit the luminosity and effective temperature spread of the red giants, her theory predicted far too many stars at the bottom of the red giant branch relative to the number of bluer giants.

The basic observational evidence for helium-burning red giants in open clusters has been given elsewhere, and I shall give here only a summary and then describe in more detail new results for one cluster, NGC 2477.

In the preceding paper, Cannon has outlined the observational evidence for the existence of a distinct concentration of stars near the base of the red giant branch in intermediate-age galactic clusters, which he tentatively identifies with the core helium burning phase of evolution occurring after the helium flash. This paper reports preliminary results of evolutionary calculations to test this identification.

Since the computation of hydrogen shell-burning evolution up the red giant branch is extremely time-consuming, the present calculations have been commenced at the stage immediately following the helium flash. It is assumed that no overall mixing occurs at the flash, so that the composition discontinuity at the hydrogen-burning shell remains sharp. The initial stellar composition was set at (X, Y, Z) = (0.68, 0.30, 0.02), corresponding to Population I material.

The most recent helium abundance determinations in main sequence B stars are those of Hardrop and Scholtz, Kodaira and Scholtz, Norris, and Leckrone. Their results indicate that it is possible to assign a helium abundance which is characteristic of all B stars. Norris and Leckrone worked with a number of B stars ranging from B0 to B9, and both have assigned a characteristic helium abundance to the B stars. Norris derived a value, A = 0.088 ± 0.012, and Leckrone a value of A = 0.106 ± 0.01, where A is the abundance of helium relative to hydrogen by number.

DF and DG white dwarfs are the only types which show metal lines (see Greenstein). Presently the only analysis is that of Weidemann who analyzed the star van Maanen 2 and found that the abundances of metals and hydrogen are the order of 10-3 and 10-2 that of solar, respectively. Bues finds H = 1 : 105 and Z = 2 × 10-4 for DB stars.

Some statistics from 368 plates of 111 double stars observed between July 1965 and January 1969 with the Yale-Columbia 26-inch refractor at Mount Stromlo Observatory, are presented. The results of plate measurements, and a description of the work, are to be published elsewhere.

The Hertzsprung phenomenon, in which secondary bumps in the light or velocity curves of cepheid variables occur at systematically earlier phases as the period lengthens, has been known for about 50 years. As part of his programme on non-linear computations of cepheid models, Christie has interpreted the effect as a progressive wave which originates near the surface, travels to the core and is reflected back. He found that the phase varied with period in the correct sense, but to make his models fit both the Hertzsprung and period-luminosity relations he had to assign to them masses only about a half of those expected from evolutionary theory. The discrepancy is one of the outstanding problems in the field.

Two important problems have emerged from observations of 18 cm OH emission sources that remain substantially unanswered by existing theories. The first is the problem of the origin of the high degree of circular polarization that is frequently observed. The second is what I have called the ‘problem of variety’: is it necessary to invoke a number of different physical mechanisms to explain the variety of qualitatively different behaviours observed, or can these different behaviours be explained by variations of one basic physical process?

In 1966 McGee, Gardner and Robinson carried out an exploratory search at 1665 MHz for OH in 26 thermal sources in the southern Milky Way and reported emission in 12 sources. Subsequent measurements by Robinson, Goss and Manchester confirmed emission from six of these and detected four additional OH emitters.

In the atmosphere of the Sun, most spectral lines are broadened by collisions between the radiating atom and neutral particles. The interaction between two atoms is usually represented by the multipole expansion of the total interaction potential. For two neutral atoms, the first non-zero term in this expansion arises from induced dipole-induced dipole forces and is proportional to r-6. Most calculations of broadening due to neutral atoms have assumed this van der Waals interaction, V(r) = —C6 r-6, between the atoms. Such an assumption is only valid if the interatomic separation is much greater than the sum of the radii of the two atoms so that no overlap occurs and only the leading term of the multipole expansion need be considered. However, in fitting the wings of solar line profiles, O’Mara found that the value of the van der Waals constant, C6, had to be increased by up to a factor of ten in order to obtain agreement between theoretical and observed profiles.

It is well known that the wings of the solar sodium D-lines cannot be predicted successfully using present line-broadening theories and elemental abundances derived from an equivalent-width analysis of the weak lines. By far the most important cause of broadening of the D-lines is collision broadening by neutral hydrogen.

The conditions for the equality of the line source functions associated with fine structure transitions in a multilevel atom have been examined by several authors. The equality or otherwise of the source functions depends largely on the value of the fine structure collision rate, equality occurring when this rate becomes infinitely large. The fact that the theoretical collision rates between fine structure levels of alkali atoms are so large suggests the possibility of simplifying complicated multilevel atom transfer problems by the consideration of the limit of an infinite fine structure collision rate.

One of the quantities usually required when solving the equation of radiative transfer is the intensity of radiation emerging from the surface of the medium under consideration. For multi-dimensional situations however, the methods presented to date have been numerical, and these first calculate the so-called source function Sv (r, Ω) as a function of position r, angle Ω and frequency v. This is generally the most difficult part of the exercise since an integro-difierential equation must be solved. The emergent intensity is then determined by solving a relatively simple first order differential equation by any of the well known numerical integration schemes. However, if the emergent intensity is required at a large number of angles, frequencies, and positions on the surface of the medium, and this is usually the case, the amount of computing needed may be considerable.