The 15th ESLAB symposium was held at the end of June 1981 in Amsterdam with the topic being X-ray astronomy. The aim of this symposium was to bring together the international astrophysical community in order to 1. review the present state of X-ray astronomy in the light of new observations gathered in recent missions and to review data on interesting objects in correlated wavelen8th regions; 2. discuss theoretical models describing the phenomena observed; 3. present ESA's European X-ray Observatory Satellite (EXOSAT) and to discuss future X-ray missions and their associated instrumenta­ tion. These topics seemed to be so interesting for the scientific community that more than 120 contributions were submitted. Of these, 94 were finally accepted and approximately 200 participants attended the 5-day meeting. The symposium was organised in nine sessions covering the whole field. Every main topic was introduced by a review lecture covering the state­ of-the-art. The aim of the meeting was to assess the impact of the new X-ray findings on the general astronomical knowled8e. The discussion ranged from non-degenerated stellar X-ray sources and stellar coronae tL supernovae, bursters, globular clusters, normal galaxies and finally to cosmology. In each field the philosophy was to bring together the relevant information obtained in radio, optical and X-ray observations followed by theoretical discussions. A large number of contributed papers were also presented within this framework.