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Practical information for all participants to the Symposium

1) Registration on Sunday 3 October (afternoon)
Material for the symposium (bags, badges, maps, lunch tickets, invitation to social dinner, book of abstract etc.) may be collected on Sunday 3 October, from 14:00 to 19:00, at the Observatoire de Paris, in Bâtiment Perrault (the main building with the white dome), in Salle du Conseil which is located at the ground floor. (This material can also be collected on Monday 4 October during the pause in the morning session at the Symposium.)

Please note: The entrance is located at 77 Avenue Denfert-Rochereau (Paris 14ème, metro Port Royal or Denfert-Rochereau). There is a bell to call the guard. A list of participants will be given to him and he will ask your name. The "Salle du Conseil" is about 300 m from the entrance, at the same level, left side of Batiment Perrault.

2) From Paris to the Amphitheatre of Meudon Observatory
- From the main railway station "Montparnasse" to "Bellevue": take the omnibus train, direction Sèvres or Sèvres R.G. (Rive Gauche). There is one train every 15 min and the journey takes 12 min. Bellevue is the 4th station, after Vanves-Malakoff, Clamart and Meudon.

- From the SNCF railway station "Bellevue" to the amphitheatre of Meudon Observatory: buses will wait for participants in front of the station, at the times given below. (If you miss the train, there will be no bus!).

Monday 4, Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 October:
departure from gare Montparnasse: 8h 39. Arrival Bellevue 8h 51.

Thursday 7 October:
departure from gare Montparnasse: 9h 09. Arrival Bellevue 9h 21.

- In the evening, after the sessions, a bus will bring participants to the Bellevue train station.

3) Transportation tickets
Mixed tickets, metro + bus + RER + train (RATP + SNCF) are available in Paris, in any metro (RATP) or railway (SNCF) station. We recommend you buy this kind of ticket. Two of them are very convenient: "Mobilis" (daily ticket) or "Paris Visite" (Tickets for 1, 2 3 or 5 days). Meudon is in the suburbs (zone 3), which means that you must buy tickets for zones 1 to 3.

More information (in English) can be found at http://www.transport-idf.com, or http://www.ratp.fr/.

4) Social dinner
The social dinner will take place on a "bateau mouche", on Wednesday 6 October, from 8 pm to 1 am. Participants are expected to embark promptly at 19h30. Invitation and information about how to get there are given with the symposium material. The bateau mouche is called "Bel Ami" and belongs to the Society Bleu Seine.

Important: Please inform the LOC (yves.viala@obspm.fr) in any of the following cases:
· you will not participate in the social dinner
· you want a vegetarian meal
· you are allergic to a particular product.

5) Computing facilities and connection to the network
A room with a few PC and MacIntosh computers (with DHCP servers) will be available to participants. It will also be possible to connect your personal computer to the network, equipped with a DHCP server. The room is located very near (100 m) to the amphitheatre (building 18), in building 15 (Computing Centre: SIO, see map on Symposium website or at the Meudon website ) and will be open from 9 am to 6 pm.

6) Posters
The total number of posters is 99! Depending on the number of supports that will be available there will be one or two poster sessions and/or one or two rooms where they will be displayed. Labelling of posters will follow the order of the book of abstracts. Poster size: typically A0, i.e. 84 x 120 cm, portrait format.

7) Invited and Contributed Talks
To avoid loss of time between talks, all speakers will have to install their presentations in advance on a computer devoted to the symposium. Please put your name on the file containing your talk and use an extension corresponding to the software used to create it (for example: viala.ppt, viala.pdf, etc). If you use more exotic software, or have special requirements, please inform the LOC!

If your presentation is ready before the start of the Symposium, please send it as an attached document to yves.viala@obspm.fr. This is the preferred option!

If the document is too large (more than 5-10 Mb), it is preferable to put it on the anonymous FTP site of the Paris Observatory.

Connect to: ftp.obspm.fr, user: anonymous, passwd: your electronic address.
Put your file on /incoming/gaia and inform the LOC (name of file, type of file…) by sending a mail to yves.viala@obspm.fr.

More information on using the anonymous ftp (in French) at: http://www.obspm.fr/~websio/fichiersHTML/Fiches/base/ftpanonyme.html).

You can also provide us with a copy of your talk on a CD Rom or USB memory stick, in advance of the session in which you are invited to talk.
Even if you have sent your talk in advance, please keep an electronic copy of your talk and bring it with you.

8) Proceedings
Instructions for the processing are available from the web site of the Symposium, along with the LaTeX template. Page allocation: 8 pages for an oral contribution, 4 pages for a poster. Deadline for receipt of papers is 12 November 2004.