Historical presentation:
The dictionary StarBriefs gathers together abbreviations, acronyms, contractions and symbols with sections devoted to Greek letters, mathematical symbols, special signs and characters, as well as to entries with a numerical beginning.
Besides astronomy and space sciences, related fields such as aeronautics, aeronomy, astronautics, atmospheric sciences, chemistry, communications, computer sciences, data processing, education, electronics, engineering, energetics, environment, geodesy, geophysics, information handling, management, mathematics, meteorology, optics, physics, remote sensing, and so on, are also covered when justified.
Abbreviations, acronyms, contractions and symbols in common use and/or of general interest have also been included when appropriate. The travelling scientist has not been forgotten (codes of airlines, locations, currencies, and so on) and humour is not quite absent from this publication either.
The underlying idea is to offer to astronomers and space scientists a practical assistant in decoding the numerous abbreviations, acronyms, contractions and symbols that they might encounter in their range of activities, including travelling. Maybe a bit paradoxically, if scientists quickly grasp the meaning of an acronym purely in their specific field, they will probably have more difficulties with adjacent fields. It is actually for this purpose that this dictionary might be more often used. Scientists might also use this compilation to avoid assigning an acronym that has already too many or confusing meanings.
This compilation is essentially carried out in parallel with the permanent updating of StarGuides, a directory of astronomy, space sciences and related organizations of the world. In practice, all major abbreviations and acronyms encountered when scanning the literature received in relation with the directory compilation are gathered here, the underlying principle being that they might also appear one day under the eyes of astronomers and space scientists.
When compiling StarGuides and StarBriefs, one cannot but be impressed by the very broad spectrum of disciplines to which astronomy and related space sciences are linked, and by the very large variety of techniques applied in these fields.
Request and/or advice to producers of documents
The meaning of abbreviations, acronyms, contractions and symbols should always be explained at their first occurrence in any document. It would be even more practical and helpful if authors and editors systematically tabulated them with their explanations at the end of the papers, chapters, reports, proceedings, books, etc., they produce. Such a policy would at least remove any ambiguity, since, as shown many times in the following pages, a given group of characters may have numerous meanings.