UV astronomy commission proposal
Dear colleagues and aficionados of ultraviolet astronomy:
Those of you who are members of the IAU will have received yesterday or today an Email from the General Secretary Thierry Montmerle announcing the start of the “indicative voting” for the new Commissions that were proposed earlier. This, because all existing Commissions will cease to exist at the coming General Assembly (GA) in August 2015 and the new ones will be established.
If you browsed through the list of commissions visible at http://www.iau.org/submissions/commissionproposal/list/, you probably noticed NC-19, which is our proposal to establish a Commission to deal with UV astronomy. The need for this Commission became evident at the last GA in Beijing, since the parent Division (XI) morphed into Division D that deals only with high energy astrophysics.
We believe that a dedicated Commission will play a major role in promoting the UV domain to a place of prominence among the different spectral domains, perhaps as much (or more) that the X-ray and IR, both in securing space missions and in educating a new generation of UV astronomers.
In order to secure these goals, we urge you to vote for NC-19 and to convince your colleagues to do the same. Please spread the word and make sure you finalize your vote before 31 December. If you are NOT a member of the IAU and have not received the GS Email, you can still help by convincing your colleagues who ARE members to vote for NC-19.
Thank you for your help, and hoping to revitalize UV astronomy,
Ana Ines Gomez de Castro, Jayant Murthy, Noah Brosch (proposers)
Weblink:
Email: Noah@wise.tau.ac.il