Astronomical Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, CZ-25165 Ondrejov

Dear colleagues,

Five months have already passed since the new Organizing committee of our WG was elected. Thanks to David McDavid's prompt editions of our Be star Newsletter, you were immediately informed about the new elected members. According to my view, it is a very encouraging fact that many relatively young astronomers became OC members and that the present OC reflects the contemporary trends in the research on active B-type stars. We have a good chance that this OC can combine the skill of more experienced members and the enthusiasm and unconventional approach of newcomers. I would like to thank all of you who took part in the election for your votes. It was too tempting to accept the honour to be the chairman of this team.

We had to start with some formal but so far unclear points concerning the status of our WG. The OC decided that IAU Division IV should be our main sponsoring division, but we would like to be linked also to Division V and its two commissions 27 (Variable stars) and 42 (Close binaries). We expect the IAU authorities to confirm this status during the next weeks. In Division IV, we are interested to collaborate closely with commissions 29 (Stellar spectra), 36 (Theory of stellar atmospheres), and 45 (Stellar classification). I expect that problems represented by commission 35 (Stellar constitution) will become really attractive for us, after data from the MONS and COROT missions are available. In fact, the above sketched links of our WG to the IAU divisions and commissions does not mean any serious change. The last activities of the OC were needed in order to fix and clarify the formal status.

I believe that our activities in the coming months and years will move mainly to astrophysical problems. As we concluded in the end of the Alicante meeting, we can expect significant progress from new echelle spectrographs placed in optimal observing sites. High quality data, e.g. from FEROS at La Silla or GIRAFFE at Sutherland, allow us to study physical processes in more detail than we could do for lower resolution multiline studies. We are all lucky to witness the beginning of the wonderful VLT project. The first pioneering papers using multi-object observations from UVES have already appeared. They give us a chance to study individual stars in other galaxies and to test e.g. theories on driving mechanisms of stellar pulsation. The MONS, COROT and Eddington missions will fulfill an old dream of the photometrist and provide us with a continuous and accurate photometric monitoring of many targets, unaffected by atmospheric effects. We all impatiently expect new results from interferometric projects and from searches for magnetic fields, the measurements of which are greatly needed to assess the roles of nonradial pulsation and magnetic fields in stellar activity and particularly in the Be star outbursts. All these observations should enable us to test recent encouraging steps achieved in the theory of circumstellar disks and X-ray binaries.

Not only the most grandiose projects, but also hundreds of small telescopes operated by advanced amateurs can contribute to the progress in our field. We can meet amateur astronomers, who show incredible enthusiasm and remarkable knowledge, and who own photometric or spectroscopic facilities producing data of nearly professional quality. These amateurs could at least partly close the gap which appeared after many smaller telescopes at professional observatories were closed. The present age of the Internet enables them to be involved in professional projects. Please, forget about our professional conceit and lend a helping hand to these people, who devote their free time, energy, and money to astronomy. In the present world of pragmatic business and cheap amusement, they deserve our sincere respect.

I would like to appreciate the dedicated job that Gerrie Peters, Doug Gies, and David McDavid do for our Be Star Newsletter and ask you all to help them. They can edit promptly the electronic version, but they can hardly publish some actual information in the printed version in time, if they have not enough papers to complete an issue.

Let me use this opportunity to wish you all a lot of strength and brilliant ideas in solving both the mysteries of distant stars and common problems of close people in the starting New Year as well as the starting Millennium.

Stanislav Stefl

OC Chairman