Program Titles and Abstracts Now Available

The study of planetary nebulae has enjoyed an amazing resurgence in the last fifteen years. This resurgence has primarily been driven by the striking asymmetries and organised complexities revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope in images of these objects and their immediate predecessors. A series of international conferences (APN I - IV, 1994 to 2007) have brought together hundreds of participants with the goal of understanding the formation of such structure.

But we are still very far from achieving this goal. Over more than a decade, many popular candidates for the relevant physical mechanisms have been discussed, e.g. jets and disks, with magnetic fields, fast stellar rotation, and binarity playing a direct or indirect role in inducing these phenomena. Bold new initiatives are now needed in order for us to unambiguously select or discard competing hypotheses, and come up with entirely new ones if necessary.

The aim of the workshop is to critically review the current status of this field and identify key observational and theoretical strategies which will help speed up our progress towards this goal.

Our hope is that the workshop will result in a research "roadmap" for the next 5-10 years, with well-defined near-term goals and milestones, which will make the best use of upcoming technological advances in instrumentation and computing. The workshop will also provide a venue for forging new alliances between observers and theorists which can help us move forward in novel ways towards understanding the behavior of aging stars as they shed their envelopes and shape their outflows.

We hope that you will be able to join us in Rochester.

Sincerely,

the SOC:

Bruce Balick, U. Washington

Eric Blackman, U. Rochester

Orsola De Marco, Macquarie University, Australia

Adam Frank, U. Rochester

Joel Kastner, Rochester Institute of Technology

Raghvendra Sahai, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech

Registration Information

Lodging is available at the Strathallan Hotel, site of the conference. The studio rate is $119.00 per night, and the one bedroom rate is $129.00 per night. Please reserve your preferred accommodation by calling the hotel at (585) 461-5010 or emailing them at reservations@strathallan.com Please be sure to identify yourself as part of the Planetary Nebula Workshop.

Reservations must be made by May 19, 2009 in order to be assured the meeting rate.