  The Baltic meetings of astronomers from Northern Germany and Scandinavia
began in 1957 and gathered up to 70 participants. Reports of the presentations
are available from all meetings, providing an overview of the interests of
astronomers in this part of the world 50 years ago. Most interesting to see for
a young astronomer in our days, I think, is that a large part of the time was
about astrometry. This focus on astrometry was the basis for the scientific
knowhow which made the idea of space astrometry realistic, resulting in the
approval by ESA of the first astrometry satellite Hipparcos in 1980 which
brought a revolution of high-precision astrometry of positions, motions and
distances of stars. The correspondence with ten observatories shows that only
one of them has any archive of letters at all from the 1950s, that is in
Copenhagen where about 7000 letters on scientific and administrative matters
are extant. - These letters have now been stored in the Rigsarkivet.
