The Impact of HST on European Astronomy

Remembrance of Things Past It scarcely seems credible that it was almost exactly thirty years ago that I ?rst met Duccio Macchetto at the ?rst meeting of the newly formed Science Working Group of what was then called the Space Telescope project. We were there in slightly d- ferent roles, Duccio as the project scientist for the Faint Object Camera and I as an interdisciplinary scientist. Henk van de Hulst was also there as the of?cial rep- sentative of ESO. The approval of the project was the end result of a great deal of lobbying and politicking both in the USA and Europe, the European contribution proving essential to the approval process in the USA. Those interested in the nit- gritty of the process should read Robert Smith’s outstanding history of the Hubble Space Telescope. We should have realized early on that we were in for a rough time. At that ?rst meeting of the Science Working Group I remember vividly NASA Headquarters telling us that the Space Telescope was a success-oriented programme that would cost M$ 680. Well, we could live with the cost-tag, but we should have had concerns about the expression “success-oriented”. This meant that everything should turn out exactly as planned, the project would be carried out within the projected time-scale and budget and the telescope would be launched in 1983. Well, the rest is history. We learned a lot of useful jargon along the way.

Stars, star formation, stellar populations and planets.- Hot Massive Stars: The Impact of HST.- HST Spectroscopy of the Hottest White Dwarfs.- Key Abundance Tracers in the UV: From the Lightest to the Heaviest.- UV Spectroscopy of Metal-Poor Massive Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud.- Star Formation Histories of Resolved Galaxies.- HST’s View of the Youngest Massive Stars in the Magellanic Clouds.- Planetary Nebulae and Their Central Stars in the Magellanic Clouds.- A Look at Neutron Stars with HST: From Positions to Physics.- The HST Contribution to Neutron Star Astronomy.- Exotic Populations in Galactic Globular Clusters.- The Stellar Mass Function in Globular Clusters.- Early Phases of Protoplanetary Disk Evolution.- Unveiling the Role of Jets in Star Formation.- A View of Star Forming Regions in the Magellanic Clouds.- A Preliminary Budget for the Ionizing Photons in HII Regions of M51.- Nearby galaxies, bulges, spheroids and galaxy formation.- New HST Views at Old Stellar Systems.- Young Massive Star Clusters in the Era of the Hubble Space Telescope.- The Central Regions of Early-Type Galaxies.- Nuclear Star Clusters Across the Hubble Sequence.- Stellar Populations in the Outskirts of M31: The View from HST.- Variable Stars in “Nearby” Galaxies with HST.- Extremely Metal-Poor Star-Forming Dwarf Galaxies.- Resolved Stellar Populations in Nearby Galaxy Halos.- The Kinematics of Core and Cusp Galaxies: Comparing HST Imaging and Integral-Field Observations.- Resolving Extragalactic Star Clusters with HST/ACS.- Tracing Galaxy Evolution in Clusters and Groups at ?1.- The Dawn of Galaxies.- A Simple Physical Model for Young Galaxies in the Early Universe.- Diffuse Ionized Gas Halos Seen with HST.- Deep fields, AGN, black holes and radio galaxies.- The Host Galaxy Properties of Powerful Radio Sources Across Cosmic Time.- A New View of the Origin of the Radio-Quiet/Radio-Loud AGN Dichotomy?.- The Bright and the Dark Side of Malin 1.- Cluster Lensing with Hubble.- HST Observations of Gravitationally Lensed QSOs.- Study of Quasar Host Galaxies Combining HST/ACS Images and VLT Spectra.- Local Lyman Emitters and Their Relevance to High Redshift Ones.- The HST View of Low Luminosity AGN.- The Black Hole Masses in Galactic Nuclei.- The HST/ACS Coma Cluster Treasury Survey.- Discovery of a Population of Evolved and Massive Galaxies at High Redshift.- Searching for High Redshift Galaxies Using Population Synthesis Models.- The ACS Grism Mode and ACS Grism Observations of Deep Fields and High Ly- Galaxies.- The Role of in the Study of Near- and Mid-infrared-selected Galaxies.- Large Scale Structure and Galaxy Evolution in COSMOS.- Mass Estimations of Supermassive Black Holes in Brightest Cluster Galaxies.- Near-UV Study of Active Galactic Nuclei with Advanced Camera for Surveys.- A Quantitative Analysis of the Morphology of Star Formation in a Sample of GOODS-HST/ACS Galaxies.- HST, H0 and dark energy.- Visiting Hubble in Orbit.- HST and JWST: Present and Future.- Enabling Science with the Hubble Legacy Archive.- Advanced Calibration Using Physical Instrument Models: HST, VLT and Beyond.- The Hubble Constant and HST.- Recent Progress on the Cepheid Distance Scale with.- Seeing Dark Energy.- Closing remarks.- Closing Remarks.