I have written elsewhere from a (mostly) celebratory point of view about early international astronomical projects. This version looks at some of the same projects, but from a less cheerful point of view.

Basic questions about black holes, some of which are fairly old, include (1) What is a black hole? (2) Do black holes exist? And the answer to this depends a good deal on the answer to (1), (3) Where, when, why, and how have they formed? and (4) What are they good for? Here I attempt some elaboration of the questions and partial answers, noting that general relativity is required to described some of the phenomena, while dear old Isaac Newton is OK for others.

Items of scientific knowledge at any moment in time have pre-histories when they were debated, doubted, or absolutely denied. The examples considered here are the admitted facts that star formation is an on-going process in the Milky Way, that there are young moving groups (the products of young star clusters in the process of dissolution and perhaps more complex processes), and that planets orbiting other stars are common. It is hard to imagine any of these ceasing to be part of core astronomical knowledge, but you are advised not to place large bets on this.

Commission 42 began life as Photometric Double Stars in 1948 at the 7th General Assembly in Zurich, under the presidency of Zdenek Kopal. As early as 1961, then General Secretary Lukas Plaut recommended a merger between C42 and C26, Double Stars, one of the original 32 commissions going back to 1919-22 (first president Aitken, assistant director at Lick). C42 became Close Binary Stars in 1970, at the 14th GA in Brighton (the first one I attended). Table 1 shows the presidents of C42, and vice presidents, from when the office started, through the history of the Commission.

Astronomers wanting to chart the whole sky, or even part of it, 24/7, must collaborate across nations, continents, and hemispheres. The Greeks were perhaps the first to do this, though Eratosthenes' measurement of the diameter of the earth was done when Alexandria and Syene were both part of Ptolemaic Egypt. The Golden Age of Arabic/Moslem astronomy coincided with times when there were very large caliphates and similar empire-like structures. The situation was very different for European astronomy at all times, with periods of successful international collaborations alternating with periods of disaster. Von Zach's “celestial police” agreed in 1800 at Lilienfeld to divide up the sky and look for the “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter. The observatory was ransacked and papers burned by retreating Napoleonic soldiers in 1813. Skipping ahead most of a century, the Carte du Ciel, George Ellery Hale's Solar Union, Kapteyn's selected areas, and several other cooperative projects had scarcely started when the Great War broke out, and a German eclipse expedition under Erwin Freundlich, which had gone to the Crimea to look for bending of starlight, was imprisoned. All members eventually got home, but the equipment was never recovered.

While British eclipse expeditions organized by Eddington saw the bending of light from Sobral and Principe in 1919, the IAU, founded in the same year, explicitly excluded Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and the other central powers (even neutrals were not admitted for several years). Indeed Germany did not adhere until 1952. IAU membership now is generally driven by financial issues, but the solution of one nation, two adhering organizations for China was a major victory for international compromise. Coming down to the present, it is interesting that Europe, the site of the outbreak of both the World Wars, has led in the establishment of the European Southern Observatory, the European Space Research Organization (now ESA), and Astronomy and Astrophysics. Even the USA is gradually learning to cooperate with other astronomical nations (though we are still not brilliantly good at it). And the current projects for very large ground-based observing facilities, with acronyms like LOFAR, SKA, GMT, EVLT, and TMT, involve most of Europe, North America, China, Japan, India, and other parts of Asia and South America. A printed version of my FM2 presentation is in press for Vol. 43 (December 2015 issue) of the Journal of American Association of Variable Star Observers (roughly half of whose membership resides outside the US).

I thank Gudrun Wolfschmidt for a list of the astronomers who made up the “celestial police”.

Radio astronomy began with one array (Jansky's) and one paraboloid of revolution (Reber's) as collecting areas and has now reached the point where a large number of facilities are arrays of paraboloids, each of which would have looked enormous to Reber in 1932. In the process, interferometry has contributed to the counting of radio sources, establishing superluminal velocities in AGN jets, mapping of sources from the bipolar cow shape on up to full grey-scale and colored images, determining spectral energy distributions requiring non-thermal emission processes, and much else. The process has not been free of competition and controversy, at least partly because it is just a little difficult to understand how earth-rotation, aperture-synthesis interferometry works. Some very important results, for instance the mapping of HI in the Milky Way to reveal spiral arms, warping, and flaring, actually came from single moderate-sized paraboloids. The entry of China into the radio astronomy community has given large (40-110 meter) paraboloids a new lease on life.

Black holes are now commonplace, among the stars, in Galactic centers, and perhaps other places. But within living memory, their very existence was doubted by many, and few chose to look for them. Zeldovich and Guseinov were first, followed by Trimble and Thorne, using a method that would have identified HDE 226868 as a plausible candidate, if it had been in the 1968 catalogue of spectroscopic binaries. That it was not arose from an unhappy accident in the observing program of Daniel M. Popper long before the discovery of X-ray binaries and the identification of Cygnus X-1 with that hot, massive star and its collapsed companion.

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:

Advances in available computing facilities, judiciously employed by our colleagues, have undoubtedly enhanced our understanding of the processes by which stars (and planets) form, from very diffuse gas to something you could almost live around. Nevertheless we remain very far from being able to describe (let alone explain) what is going on in many cases. And this is likely to remain true even as Moore's Law growth begins to hit its head against energy and power considerations. A large fraction of long-standing questions appear to have honest answers of the general form, “yes and no”, “all of the above”, or “some of them are and some of them aren't”. This includes many of my favorites, like triggering, formation of binary populations, and the role of magnetic fields. Rather few questions have actually been retired from the universe of discourse in recent years.

The Supernova Working Group was re-established at the IAU XXV General Assembly in Sydney, 21 July 2003, sponsored by Commissions 28 (Galaxies) and 47 (Cosmology). Here we report on some of its activities since 2005.

Division XII consists of Commissions that formerly were organized under the Executive Committee, that concern astronomers across a wide range of scientific sub-disciplines and provide interactions with scientists in a wider community, including governmental organizations, outside the IAU.

Division VIII gathers astronomers engaged in the study of the visible and invisible matter in the Universe at large, from Local Group galaxies via distant galaxies and galaxy clusters to the large-scale structure of the Universe and the cosmic background radiation.

Division XII consists of Commissions that formerly were organized under the Executive Committee, that concern astronomers across a wide range of scientific sub-disciplines and provide interactions with scientists in a wider community, including governmental organizations, outside the IAU.

The winding up of a conference like this provides the opportunity to look (1) backwards at how we reached the present stage of understanding of binary star behavior and its relationship to the rest of astronomy, (2) around at the garden of unsolved problems, and (3) cautiously forward at what might come next.

SN 1006 was the first (and for a very long time the only) event to be caught before peak light. A passage which, according to Stephenson, does not actually pertain to the SN, nevertheless makes clear that, even then, a hypothesis was more likely to be accepted if it made a prediction later verified, though the prediction was that something bad would happen to Emperor Sanjo In. The hypothesis was that the star was not new, but related to behavior of existing stars in Qichen Jianjun. According to the poster by P.J. Boner, Kepler made the opposite choice for ‘his’ SN, calling it a genuinely new star formed out of the ether, rather than mere change in appearance. Indeed the distinction between true novae and variable stars was not drawn correctly until Hevelius's 1662 study of Mira, after Tycho had shown that his event (and the comet of 1577) were more distant than our Moon, a point disputed by many of his contemporaries, but accepted by Galileo, who applied a very early statistical method to many different observations of SN 1572. Tycho's main advantages were better equipment and hard work, again not so different from present conditions.

“Early” maps of the cosmos included the 26th dynasty air god Shu supporting the sky goddess Nut above the earth god Geb, Descartes' Voronoi tesselation, William Herschel's star gauging, and Carl Charlier's 1922 plot of the nebulae in NGC, which he intended as observational support for the fractal nature of large scale cosmic structure (about which he was probably wrong, though right about there being more than one level of clustering). Because Shapley, van Maanen, and others were still denying the very existence of external galaxies at the same time that Lundmark and Opik were measuring their distances and masses and Charlier plotting hierarchies, the story of the discovery of very large scale structure (and streaming) in the universe cannot be told in perfectly linear fashion. There are, however, half a dozen or so discrete phases that can be recognized and three underlying themes, (1) expanding horizons, (2) additional levels of structure, and (3) increasing mediocrity of our vantage point.

The chief evidence for appreciable dark matter in the universe comes from the monotonic increase in mass to light ratios measured for various astronomical systems as one looks on larger and larger length scales. Though the evidence comes from photons, most of the dark matter is non-photonic, and, for that matter, non-baryonic. There remain several questions about the nature and behavior of dark matter to which conventional astronomical observations are (probably) relevant. The most germain to this JD is whether astronomers have seen decay or annihilation products from dark matter particles, to which the current answer seems to be no. We look at a few of the others.