Abstract:
Recent research on planetary nebulae is reviewed, with special emphasis on ultraviolet and infrared observations. Various distance scales and statistics based on them are discussed and the emperical mass-radius relation due to Maciel & Pottasch (1980) is used to compile a new list of local planetaries. Recent determinations of the effective temperatures of central stars and their new locations onthe H-R diagram are described. The implications of the chemical abundance studies of these nebulae are discussed in the light of current work on stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis.