ETA-CARINAE AND ITS ENVIRONMENT

Eta Carinae (Eta) is one of the most remarkable of all well-studied st ars and perhaps the most poorly understood. Observations with the Hubb le Space Telescope and other modern instruments have solved a few of t he mysteries concerning this object while opening a comparable number of new ones. In this review we first recount some essential background information concerning Eta, then we sketch most of the observational developments of the past few years, related to the star itself and to its ejecta. Throughout, we propose a series of specific unsolved obser vational and theoretical problems that seem especially interesting or important at this time.