IAU Symposium 190, New Views of the Magellanic Clouds, was held in Victoria, Canada in July. The "presence" of CTIO facilities in research on the Clouds was noteworthy. Four CTIO scientific staff were in attendance. Chris Smith delivered an invited talk on Mapping the Ionized Gas in the Magellanic Clouds, a large-scale survey program being conducted with the Curtis Schmidt Telescope. A. Walker, N. Suntzeff, and R. Probst presented poster papers on star formation history in the LMC from a photometric imaging survey, chemical evolution in the SMC derived from spectroscopic abundance analysis, and the morphology of cold molecular gas in 30 Doradus indicated by narrowband IR imaging.
Many other presentations were based entirely or largely on data obtained at CTIO. Out of about 80 oral and poster observational papers using groundbased optical/IR data, CTIO facilities accounted for somewhat more than 40%. The massive imaging throughput of the BTC CCD mosaic camera was the basis for several papers on star formation history derived from deep, dense color-magnitude diagrams of field stars; these complemented HST studies of crowded clusters. 4-m echelle spectroscopy is being used to study kinematics and abundances in the energetic interstellar medium, and the evolution of SN1987A. Frequently this is in conjunction with groundbased radio, space X-ray, HST imaging, and HST spectroscopy. The smaller CTIO-based telescopes were well represented in photometric cluster and field star studies, initial results from the massive MACHO survey database (including a CMD of 9 million stars), the southern 2MASS IR survey, IR metallicity work on molecular clouds (using a visitor instrument on the 1.5-m), and proper motion of the LMC, among many topics.
It was evident from the geographic distribution of authors that CTIO dominates the facilities used by American astronomers for groundbased work on these key extragalactic objects.
Ron Probst (rprobst@noao.edu)