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\mh{Address by the Scientific Organizing Committee}

\noindent Dear colleagues,\vskip\baselineskip

\noindent Also from us a warm welcome at this IAU Symposium No. 212. We are 
de\-lighted to see you all here, on one of the beautiful Canary Islands. 
All of us are aware of the fact that the neighboring islands Tenerife and 
La Palma are extremely important for present day astronomy, because of their 
outstanding astronomical observatories and institutes. But some 2000 years 
ago the Canary Islands played already a world-scale scientific role, in the days 
that naviga\-tion and astronomy became closely interlinked. About 300 bc, 
the concept of coordinates had been developed and lines of latitude and 
longitude began criss\-crossing our worldview. By ad $\sim$ 130, the Greek 
astronomer and cartographer Claudius Ptolemaeus, working in the library of 
Alexandria, Egypt, had plotted them on twenty-seven maps of his first world 
atlas, containing the coordinates of $\sim$ 8000 places on Earth, where the 
equator marked the \hbox{zero-degree} paral\-lel of latitude. Ptolemaeus was free, however, to put his prime meridian, the
\hbox{zero-degree} longitude line, wherever he liked. He chose to run it through the
Fortunate Islands, now called the Canary and Madeira Islands. Later map\-makers
moved the prime meridian, according to their political preferences, to
the Azores and to the Cape Verde Islands, as well as to Rome, Amsterdam,
Copenhagen, Jerusalem, St. Petersburg, Paris, Pisa and Philadelphia, among
other places, before it settled finally in Greenwich, London (e.g., Sobel 1995).
But the first prime meridian ran through here. So much for our fortunate and
well appreciated venue.

\bigskip

\noindent
This symposium is concerned with massive stars. Massive stars are mani\-festing
themselves prominently through the work of you all and others in numer\-ous
aspects of astrophysics. We mention here briefly two aspects: (i) thanks to
infrared image-masking interferometry with the Keck telescope a few of the near\-est
dust-producing WC stars have been imaged, to show rotating dust plumes
in the wake of colliding wind cones, proving the binarity of these objects in
a most spectacular way (Tuthill et al. 1999; Monnier et al. 2002); and (ii)
thanks to X-ray spectroscopy, massive stars at cosmological distances have been
linked via supernovae and hypernovae to Gamma-Ray Bursts. E.g., XMM data
of GRB 011211 shows emission lines of Mg, Si, S, Ar, Ca and Ni originating
in hot gas moving outward by 26 000 kms$^{-1}$. Those data favor models where
a supernova explosion, responsible for the outflowing matter, from a massive
stellar progenitor in the Wolf-Rayet phase, precedes the GRB event caused by
core collapse (Reeves et al. 2002).

\bigskip

\noindent
We wish you all a very constructive and pleasant five working days here.
\vskip.5\baselineskip

\bigskip

\noindent {\it Karel A. van der Hucht and Artemio Herrero, co-chairs SOC\\
Lanzarote, 24 June 2002}

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\begin{thebibliography}{}
\item{}
Monnier, J.D., Tuthill, P.G., Danchi, W.C. 2002, ApJ (Letters) 567, L137

\item{}
Ptolemaeus, C. $\sim$130,
$\Gamma\epsilon\omega\gamma\rho\alpha\phi\iota\kappa\eta\ \upsilon\phi\eta\gamma\eta\sigma\iota\zeta$ (Geographical Guide)

\item{}
Reeves, J.N., Watson, D., Osborne, J.P., et al. 2002, Nature 416, 512

\item{}
Sobel, D., 1995, Longitude (London: Fourth Estate), p. 2

\item{}
Tuthill, P.G., Monnier, J.D., Danchi, W.C. 1999, Nature 398, 487

\end{thebibliography}
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