29. Stellar Spectra (Spectres Stellaires)

Extract

Over the past 3 years the availability of abstracts, journal's table-of-content, bibliographic searches and even preprints on the Internet means that summaries such as this will be unnecessary. The AAS WWW bibliographical/abstract services (http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/aas/) accesses several useful sites: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/aas-search.shtml for bibliographic searches of ApJ, ApJL, ApJS, AJ and PASP from 1988 to the present. The ADS abstract bibliographic service covering in addition A&A, A&AS, MNRAS, PASJ, RMexAyA, PASAus, IrishAJ, BASInd, BalAst and other journals is http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstractjervice.html; http://adsabs.harvard.edu/toc.service.html is for table-of-content queries that are useful for browsing the same journals. Most of these services are also available through the CDS (http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/CDS.html) in several different languages. From this site can also be obtained published tables from astronomical journals as well as other data that have been deposited by individuals. The SIMBAD database (http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/Simbad.html) maintains its importance as a stellar database in particular. It is necessary to have a user account to access SIMBAD. The ApJ contents is now online at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/contents/ApJ. Notable by its absence from these data bases is Nature from whose home page (http://www.nature.com) the TOC of the current year's issues only can be browsed after registering. Preprints can be obtained from http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/astro-ph covering the years 1992 to the present. The various search engines also often turn up papers given at conferences or in other publications than the mainstream astronomical journals. Transition probabilities and term levels are an important area long neglected for the provision of digital data (with the honourable exception of CDROM 18 from R.L.Kurucz). The spectroscopic databases of the NIST (http://aeldata.phys.nist.gov/nist_atomicjpectra.html) now contain extensive data for some elements, in particular the transitional probabilities for the iron group elements. One assumes that the list of elements with gf values will be progressively increased. It is obvious from a perusal of these web sources as well as noting the rapid filling of library shelves, that the number of papers being published in astronomy and astrophysics continues its inexorable increase. This makes it even more difficult to do justice to all the work done over the past 3 years.