Minutes of the meeting of the
Working Group on Active B Stars
held on August 27, 1997 during
the 23rd General Assembly of the IAU

The 23rd General Assembly in Kyoto was attended by more than 2000 registered participants and it was necessary to schedule many parallel sessions. Very unfortunately, this also led to only a limited attendance of the Working Group meeting. There was a similar problem with many of the other business sessions, and this was called to the attention of the IAU Executive Committee. Yet, people like Dr. M. Jerzykiewicz, the newly elected president of Division V were present.

The meeting was chaired by Dr. John R. Percy who first announced the newly elected members of the organizing committee of the WG Drs. J. Bjorkman, V. Niemela, A. Okazaki and S. Stefl and reported that Drs. K. Garmany, P. Harmanec, M. Smith and R. Waters are leaving the committee after serving for two consecutive periods. They were thanked for their service to the WG. Dr. Dietrich Baade has been elected as the new chairman to replace Dr. M.A. Smith.

Then, the plans to have another large international conference devoted to active B stars were discussed at some length. Since Hungarian colleagues plan to organize a meeting on stellar pulsations in Budapest between August 9 and 13, 1999 (to celebrate the one-hundredth year anniversary of the Konkoly Observatory and to allow witnessing a total solar eclipse during the meeting), there was a proposal to have the B star meeting (to be held in Alicante, Spain) in a week before or after the Budapest meeting. However, it was stressed that the Budapest meeting will mainly be focused on (late-type) Cepheids and RR Lyr stars. Moreover, Dr. Fabregat, the chairman of the provisional Local Organizing Committee of the planned Alicante meeting, announced that the Congress hall will only be available in June and July but not in August. Furthermore, the weather is hot, and the city is crowded in August. The majority opinion then was to hold the meeting in June as originally recommended by the Spanish hosts.

Some discussion took place on the three tentative titles of the meeting suggested by the Scientific Organizing Committee. The title ``OB Stars and the Be phenomenon'' was considered to be the most appropriate one by most of the participants. It was also recommended that the SOC should try to contact the colleagues who regularly organize meetings on mass loss from luminous stars and coordinate the program of the meeting with their plans.

The next topic was the Be Newsletter. Dr. P. Harmanec reminded that the suggestion of the organizing committee of the WG which met in Juan les Pins in 1993 was to replace the printed Newsletter by an electronic board with an automatic circulation of the news, calls for observations etc. He expressed the opinion that the Be Newsletter is sometimes being misused for cheap unrefereed publishing. His opinion was partly opposed by Dr. J. Percy who agreed with the idea of an electronic board but expressed his belief that the printed Newsletter is still very helpful to colleagues who do not have an easy access to Internet. No further discussion followed and no recommendation was accepted on this matter, though there was sympathy for keeping the paper edition. The meeting then discussed the idea of having an electronic ``bulletin board'' for time-dependent information, such as unusual behaviour of stars, and observing campaigns. Dr. Conny Aerts agreed to conduct this bulletin board, as long as it did not develop into a discussion or ``chat'' group.

Several brief scientific presentations followed. Dr. P. Harmanec reported about the systematic UBV monitoring of bright Be stars at Hvar. A summary report on these 1972-1990 observations will soon appear in press (Pavlovski, Harmanec, Bozic et al. 1997 A&AS, 125, 75). This paper also contains references to all earlier studies based on Hvar photometry. In two other papers (Harmanec, Pavlovski, Bozic et al. 1997 Journal of Astronomical Data; Harmanec and Horn 1997, Journal of Astronomical Data), the original observations, complete data archives and software for the data reduction and retrieval will be published.

Then, Dr. J. Percy reported on his program of UBV monitoring of Be stars which includes Toronto observations, observations secured with the Phoenix-10 Automatic Photoelectric Telescope and observations obtained by the AAVSO photoelectric photometry program. The results are in press (Percy et al., PASP). The data are to be deposited in the IAU Archives of unpublished observations. As a rule, the same comparison and check stars as those recommended for the international campaign and used at Hvar were usually adopted.

These two large data sets, in combination with the long-term monitoring program organized by C. Sterken at ESO, represent a substantial increase of our knowledge about the light and colour behaviour of bright Be stars on various time scales.

In a comment to this, Dr. M. Jerzykiewicz offered his unpublished UBV observations of ES Vul.

Finally, Dr. N.G. Bochkarev reported on ocassional optical flares of V1357 Cyg, the optical counterpart of the well-known X-ray source Cyg X-1. Some doubts were raised on the reality of this phenomena but Dr. P. Harmanec reported that the Hvar data also show similar brightenings for some ``more normal'' Be binaries (without a known X-ray secondary in the system).