Springer Mass-Losing Pulsating Stars and their Circumstellar Matter: Observations and Theory: 283 (Astrophysics and Space Science Library, 283)

Editing the proceedings of a scientific meeting is not an easy task. Sometimes people who give an excellent talk do not send the manuscript by the deadline. However, this time, thanks to the punctuality of all the participants, we have this excellent volume for the workshop on mass losing pulsating stars and their circumstellar matter prepared in time. Almost all of the oral presentations including the summary are collected in this volume. We regret that we cannot put in this volume a few posters that we failed to receive before the editorial work. The workshop was planned as a small meeting with less than fifty attendants because the city of Sendai was far from the most of the active institutions. However, the number of submitted papers exceeded the SOC's expectation; many interesting contributions had to be scheduled in the poster session. Still, the oral sessions were so tight that many participants might have felt frustrated for the shortage of discussions. The organizers of the workshop have to apologize to the attendants for the inconvenience caused from such a happy underestimate about the size of the workshop. Review "AGB variables are far more interesting than I had previously thought. I don't hesitate to recommend this book, not only to those specifically involved with those stars, but also to those in the related fields of pulsation and/or mass loss, and even to a more-general readership." (Rich Townsend in The Observatory, 124:1178 (February 2004)