Over the last two decades there has been an accumulation of exciting evidence that appears to show that, as early as 5000 years ago, people in Britain were making precise observations of the Sun, Moon, and stars, and studying small perturbations in the lunar motion. Structures such as Stonehenge, and the s thousands of other megalithic sites in Britain, are then seen as prehistoric observations. Within these, data would be (accumulated to enable the prediction of celestial phenomena such as eclipses, and allow the construction of a calendar. Recently however a small number of rigorous statistical studies of the sites have cast doubt on the astronomical hypotheses, and have posed the question of whether some of the support for these hypotheses has been generated by well-intentioned but over-enthusiastic selections of chance alignments. In this review, the arguments and counter arguments are presented and examined, and we see what can be salvaged from the astronomical hypotheses after the statistical smoke has cleared.

A brief description of astronomy in New Zealand both amateur and professional, past and present is given, with particular emphasis on the work carried out by the two professional establishments; the Carter Observatory, Wellington and the Mt John University Observatory of the University of Canterbury.

The original concept of the International Halley Watch was presented by Louis Friedman to NASA in 1979. The intent was to maximise the scientific value of ground-based and space studies of Comet Halley. This initial suggestion met with a very positive response and has developed into a smooth organization, principally concerned with rapid communication and promoting co-operation between scientists in a wide range of disciplines. The main aim here is to put the IHW in perspective; further details of its origin and evolution can be found in Newsletter No. 1, from which the following three diagrams are taken: To quote from Newsletter No. 1 ‘The most important elements in the IHW are the Professional Observers and the Discipline Specialist Teams. Without the Observers, there can be no Halley Watch, and without the Discipline Specialists, there would be no co-ordination of observations.’ If there are any professional observers who have not yet been contacted by a Discipline Specialist it is recommended that they make their interest known immediately.

This meeting provides the first opportunity for me to talk about the Australia Telescope as an established project. It has been formally approved at all levels and is now under way (see Fig. 1).

Magnetic fields of about 1012 G have now been measured in several astrophysical objects (Trümper etal. 1978, Wheaton et al. 1979, Mazets et al. 1981). In the case of pulsating X-ray sources, the presence of a companion star indicates that accretion is probably the energy source for the X-rays.

Figure 1 is a plot of spin angular momentum, J, against mass, m, for some of the main sequence stars, the planets and the asteroids.

The NASA Voyager spacecraft missions to the outer planets have provided a wealth of observational data with regard to the physical and chemical properties of the attendant satellite systems. Although the gaseous nebula discs from which these satellites are suspected to have formed are no longer present, these data provide at least some basis from which the characteristics of individual nebula can be deduced.

An intriguing problem in cosmogony concerns the ability of a planetoid embedded in a nebula disc to clear a gap around its orbit. The application of density wave theory to this problem has demonstrated that a significant exchange of angular momentum can take place between a planetoid and a disc (Goldreich and Tremaine 1980). The torque exerted by the disc on the planetoid can result in orbital drifting of the latter, which may play an important role in the aggregation process (Hourigan and Ward 1983). In fact, in the absence of significant deformation of the nebula, the radial orbital drift rate of a planetoid increases with planetoid mass. In this case, it would be expected that only one or two planetoids would sweep out the nebula, a situation not compatible with present observations. The orbital drift resulting from the generation of density waves therefore requires a limiting mechanism.

A large number of barred spiral galaxies contain a ring-like structure surrounding the bar. This is known as an inner ring if the bar terminates at the ring. Structures which are not closed but which appear to be related phenomena are given the name pseudo-inner rings by de Vaucouleurs (1959).

Mestel, Wang and Westfold (1984; ‘MWW’) have recently introduced a pulsar magnetosphere model in which electrons leave the star with non-negligible, but not highly-relativistic, speeds, and flow with moderate acceleration along magnetic field lines before reaching a limiting surface, near which rapid acceleration occurs. Such moderately accelerated flows are analysed here. A second class of flows, which do not encounter a region of rapid acceleration, is found.

Of the attempts to model the Magellanic system as the result of tidal interactions, only the works of Lin and Lynden-Bell (LLB 1982) and Murai and Fujimoto (MF 1981) can be considered to be successful.

Barred spirals are well-known to include several ‘distinct components’ or morphological structures in the light distribution (Sandage 1961; de Vaucouleurs 1959; Kormendy 1979). In addition to the bar, spheroid, and disk components, one often observes ring-like enhancements at discrete relative positions within the disk. These inner rings (r), outer rings (R), and nuclear rings (nr) have been the subject of recent, fairly intensive observational (Buta 1984a; Kormendy J979; de Vaucouleurs and Buta 1980a,b; Athanassoula et al. 1982) and theoretical (Schwarz 1979,1981,1984a,b,c; Simkin, Su, and Schwarz 1980) research, and it now seems well-established that most rings are linked to dynamical resonances with the bar.

Cyclotron lines have been observed in the X-ray spectra of two pulsed sources: Her X-1 (Trümper et al. 1978) and 4U 0115 + 63 (Wheaton et al. 1979). The generally accepted model for these objects involves an accretion flow from a companion star in a close binary system onto small regions close to the magnetic poles of a strongly magnetized neutron star. Immediately above the surface, matter is confined in an accretion column by the magnetic field.

In theories of the heating of the solar corona a number of authors have recently considered the propagation and damping of fast and slow magnetohydrodynamic waves, in the form of surface waves localized on the interfaces of coronal flux tubes (Ionson 1978, Wentzel 1979, Roberts 1981, Cramer and Donnelly 1983). The damping of these waves occurs, in addition to a rather weak global damping due to viscous or resistive dissipation, by means of a localized absorption at a so-called ‘resonance’ in the density or magnetic field profile forming the flux tube. At such a resonance, the wave frequency is equal to the local value of the Alfven wave frequency, in the case of Alfven resonance absorption, or at the local slow mhd wave frequency, in the case of the ‘cusp’ or ‘compressive singularity’ resonance in a finite pressure plasma.

Truncated modal expansions have provided a powerful, reasonably accurate and flexible approach to the problem of non-linear thermal convection. They permit tractable numerical solutions of three-dimensional cellular motions, as well as readily accommodating large density variations, time dependence, rotation and magnetic fields.

The satellites of the outer solar system appear to be composed principally of water ice and silicates, with the presence of ammonia and methane hydrates (Lewis 1971). Although these bodies are small (with radii typically < 1000 km) they can exhibit very active evolutionary histories, due to the low melting point of water ice.

There have been extensive calculations of model atmospheres of stars over the past few decades. Almost all of these calculations have assumed radiative equilibrium. Except for convection, very little work has been done on the stability of the surface layers of stars at small optical depths. Although there has been a considerable amount of research concerning the stability of stars, this work has assumed the diffusion approximation for the transport of radiation and has been primarily concerned with the envelopes of stars rather than their atmospheres.

A common test for hydrodynamic calculations is the Boss and Bodenheimer (1979, 1981, hereafter BB) problem in which an isothermal, spherical cloud of 1 M⊙ is given a cos (2Φ) density perturbation and the ensuing evolution studied.

The classical model of the interstellar medium consists of cool clouds (typical temperature 80 K, number density 20-40 cm-3) moving through a warmer interstellar medium (104 K, 0.15-0.3 cm-3) at a rms velocity of ~ 10 km s-1. More recent models have included the coronal gas (106 K) as part of this medium. We consider the collisions of these clouds in order to determine whether these collisions initiate star formation and/or change the state of the interstellar medium.

The evolution of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars as a function of mass and composition has been studied by Becker and Iben (1979, 1980) for M≥3 M⊙. The results from calculations like these may be used to provide input data for calculations of synthetic AGB star populations, as has been done by Wood and Cahn (1977), Iben (1981) and Renzini and Voli (1981).