1 Introduction

This paper is the natural complement of an earlier study (Heck 1998b) devoted to the geographical distribution of observational activities for astronomy. The current contribution studies the geographical distributions of astronomy-related organizations over the world, professional as well as for amateur and grand public.

As in the previous paper, the data originate from the master files for StarGuides (Heck 1998a) and StarWorlds (Heck et al. 1994), the latter one being the WWW version of the former one which is a classical directory on paper (for a detailed presentation, refer to the previous study or to Heck 1997). The files are gathering together all practical data available on associations, societies, scientific committees, agencies, companies, institutions, universities, etc., and more generally organizations, involved in astronomy and space sciences.

But many other related types of entries have also been included such as academies, advisory and expert committees, bibliographical services, data and documentation centres, dealers, distributors, funding agencies and organizations, journals, manufacturers, meteorological services, museums, norms and standards offices, planetariums, private consultants, public observatories, publishers, research institutions in related fields, software producers and distributors, and so on.

Besides astronomy and related space sciences, other fields such as aeronautics, aeronomy, astronautics, atmospheric sciences, chemistry, communications, computer sciences, data processing, education, electronics, energetics, engineering, environment, geodesy, geophysics, information handling, management, mathematics, meteorology, optics, physics, remote sensing, and so on, are also covered when justified. All the categories are appropriately flagged in a way that turned out to be very useful to sort out the entries as needed for the current study.

It is appropriate to remind here that we are dealing with validated and authenticated information (from signed and documented questionnaires), systematically compiled and presented, with a permament updating-process scheme. The expertise built up over now almost a quarter of a century in this exercise, as well as the overall stability of the master files, guarantee an excellent exhaustivity of the entries and an homogeneous coverage of the practical data gathered together. As it can be concluded from the illustrations, the distributions appear as not being biased by the various locations from which the compilations have been carried out (successively Belgium, Central Spain and Northeastern France) - in fact the places where we have been based during the last three decades.

The files used are certainly the best sources available today for the study at hand which was carried out immediately after a major annual updating campaign. It should also be recalled here that, contrary to most on-line resources, StarWorlds is not only WWW-oriented.

Sets of coordinates are explicitly requested on our questionnaires and updating forms, but, as already explained in Heck (1998b), less than one third of the organizations register them. Therefore, to be able to carry out this study with all the entries in a systematic way, we entered for each of them a position based on the location of the organization head office or main centre of activities (hereafter called "city reference coordinates''). The coordinates were taken from a Rand McNally International Atlas (160 000 entries) and a Times Atlas of the World (210 000 entries) which appear to usefully complement each other and to be consistent as to their reference frame. A Rand McNally Zip Code Finder (for the US) as well as Michelin and Kümmerly+Frey road maps (essentially for European countries) were very helpful to locate from their postal codes small places not listed in the atlases. In such cases, the coordinates of the closest larger cities were recorded and explicitely mentioned as such in the master files. Complementary queries by mail and e-mail solved a few additional cases. Finally only 17 entries (0.28%) have no coordinates.