15th February 2022

Dear Massive Stars Community,

Today we are happy to announce the programme of talks and the opening of registration for IAU Symposium 361: “Massive Stars Near and Far”, and we look forward to seeing many of you in Ireland in May of this year.

Programme:

The list of invited and contributed talks is now available on the meeting website. The SOC received many high-quality abstracts for contributed talks and posters, with requests for talks oversubscribed by almost 3.5 times. Members of the SOC graded every abstract on a scale of 1 to 5 and the contributed talks were selected on the basis of the 50 abstracts with the best average grade.  Total number of contributed talks is 54 because there were a few with identical grades.  We will put together a timetable soon and post this on the meeting website.
We would like to sincerely thank everybody who submitted an abstract. We hope you can all agree with us that the final programme is an excellent and exciting cross-section of the research being doing all over the world by our community, and we encourage you to come to the meeting! Most of the abstracts that were not selected for a contributed talk will be accepted as a poster contribution instead; we will send out an email before the end of the week with the SOC decision.

Registration:

Online Registration is now open. This is a one-step process using the EventBrite platform, where you enter your information in the required boxes and then pay the registration fee immediately.  We hope that using an international payments/booking platform will make the registration and payment process easier for everyone this time around.

Hotel Booking:

After you register you will receive an email that contains a Promotional Code to unlock the conference rate at the Symposium hotel.  The conference rate is guaranteed until the end of March or until the 27th of March or until the hotel is booked out.  We have 200 rooms block booked.  The detailed instructions for booking a hotel room are also available on our accommodation page. Note that you cannot book the hotel before you have registered.

IAU Travel Grants:

We have forwarded the SOC recommendation for the distribution of travel grants to the IAU Assistant General Secretary.  We hope that these will be processed promptly and that an offer letter will be sent out in the coming days.  We are holding enough registrations in reserve so that all travel grant awardees can register and book a hotel room.  There will be a system allowing awardees to use their travel grant to offset the registration fees, if you wish to avoid the up-front costs of paying the fee now.  Please feel free to wait until you get the notification from the IAU before completing registration.

Local Travel:

We will provide buses to bring people from Dublin Airport/Dunsink Observatory to the Slieve Russell Hotel on Sunday throughout the day, and back to Dublin Airport on Friday afternoon.  Bus times are to be confirmed, but we will endeavour to accommodate different arrival/departure times. Alternate travel suggestions and further information on visas can be found on our “Getting Here” page.

Best regards,
The SOC and LOC of IAUS361