Foreword

The present form of the report of the activities of the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences does not differ significantly from the last year report. Its structure and layout are, however, considerably different from those in the corresponding Slovak version (also available at our web page).

Here, we focus almost uniquely on the scientific activities of the Institute and omit a number of important "non-scientific" issues, like, e.g., financial matters of the institute, teaching commitments at universities, etc.; these can only be found in the Slovak version.

Looking back at the year 2005 let me just briefly summarize major accomplishments. The amount of scientific production is expressed by 66 papers in internationally distinguished refereed journals and 11 articles in referred conference proceedings. A number of interesting results have been obtained, some of them being highlighted in what follows. Our institute plays a very important role in 20 well-established international projects and a number of informal collaborations.

Our institute organized a lecture course given by Prof. Dr. Juergen Staude from the Astrophysical Institute (Potsdam, Germany) on the topic of the Solar Magnetohydrodynamics on Oct 4-7, 2005. PhD as well as undergraduate students have taken part including some staff members of the institute.

The last volume of our journal Contributions of the Astronomical Observatory Skalnate Pleso (number 35) appeared in three regular issues. The journal is covered by the ISI and is electronically available from our web page (http://www.astro.sk) and the ADS database as well.

We have also succeeded in substantially improving our observational facilities. The 0,5-m reflecor for CCD photometry of stars at Stara Lesna was rebuilt for automatical regime.

It was increased throughput of our intranet connection to the Skalnate Pleso and Lomnicky Stit observatories to 11 Mbps. Connection of the local gateway of the SANET academic internet nerwork at Stara Lesna to its backbone in Poprad has been increased to 34Mbps.
 
 
 
Ján Svoren
director of AI SAS



Jan Rybak 2007-01-10