On May 26 & 27, 1998, about 50 participants met for the workshop ``NICMOS and the VLT'' in Pula, Sardinia, Italy. The goal of the workshop was to review what has been achieved with the Near Infrared and Multi Object Spectrograph (NICMOS) on board of HST, what can be achieved in the remaining lifetime of the instrument, and how NICMOS observations can be optimized taking into account the availability of IR imaging and spectroscopy on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the near future. The workshop took place at a time when the expected remaining lifetime of NICMOS was about 7 months, and the first call for proposals for VLT was about 3 month away. The timeliness of the workshop was underlined by the fact that first light for the VLT occurred in the midst of this meeting, which has not been anticipated at the time the date for the workshop was set. Also at the time of the workshop, the prospects for extending the lifetime of NICMOS through the installation of a cryo-cooler have improved enough to warrant a serious consideration of this possibility. A technical expert presentation on this topic was also given at the workshop and is published here.
Considerable NICMOS expertise was present through the participation of a large fraction of the the NICMOS IDT as well as the STScI and ST-ECF NICMOS groups. On the VLT side, the IR instrumentation was presented by the ESO head of IR instrumentation and news of the VLT first light was brought directly from the ESO headquarters in Garching. The presence of experts as well as the pleasant atmosphere of the workshop fostered numerous discussions outside the formal program.
From the beginning, our plan was to publish proceedings of this workshop very shortly after the workshop. The interesting and timely presentations given during the meeting strengthen the case for distributing them in written form as soon as possible. These proceedings will now be mailed less than two months after the workshop. This achievement was made possible by the cooperation of the authors who contributed to this volume, the hard work of Britt Sjoeberg the workshop secretary, a fast cover design from Ed Janssen and help with the printing arrangements from Kurt Kjär at ESO. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific and Harry Payne at STScI also allowed us to use their LATEX style files and other software to ease the preparation of this volume. Bob Fosbury made available several beautiful high quality photographs of the meeting and its surroundings which appear within this volume and on the cover, although regrettably in much poorer quality reproductions. Norbert Pirzkal provided invaluable help in reformatting and checking some papers.
We would like to thank them all.
Garching, June 1998
Wolfram Freudling (Workshop Chair) & Richard Hook (Principal Editor)