This book has two major objectives. The first is to summarize our present knowledge of the local interstellar medium (LISM) from its interactions with the heliosphere and astrospheres to the Local Bubble. The second is to identify the morphological complexity, inhomogeneity, and other physical properties seen in the LISM that likely occur elsewhere in the Milky Way and other galaxies but cannot be studied by observations for lack of spatial resolution and brightness for high-resolution spectroscopy. This knowledge can then be applied to more distant interstellar media. While the LISM likely does not contain the full range of properties seen in the ISM elsewhere in the Galaxy, it does include a wide range of properties and physical processes found elsewhere in the Galaxy. The new observational data from the Hubble Space Telescope, Voyager missions, IBEX spacecraft, and GAIA, together with major theoretical developments, are making great strides in resolving the complex structure of the LISM, including its history and the physical processes that control it. Now is an opportune time to describe the local interstellar medium from our inside perspective.

The American Astronomical Society recently honored Jeffrey Linsky as a Fellow of the AAS "for decades of innovative studies of the heliosphere and the local interstellar medium; for his models of stellar chromospheres, for productive observing programs on multiple satellites and for establishing the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in the local disk, among other scientific contributions, and for his decades of service to the astronomical community."
He has played a very active role in establishing the scientific objectives of numerous NASA telescopes including the Far Ultraviolet Spectrograph Observatory (FUSE), Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) including being on the science teams that designed the High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS), the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). He has served on many advisory groups for NASA including peer review panels and science advisory groups for various missions and has served on two Senior Review Panels for NASA.
His research covers the topics of stellar chromospheres, stellar coronae, stellar winds, exoplanet atmospheres, and the local interstellar medium. He has published 407 peer reviewed papers (H-index = 88) in the astrophysical journals, has written one book (Host Stars and their effects on Exoplanet Atmospheres) and edited five others, and has written a number of review papers on these topics. He is often asked to be an invited speaker at scientific conferences in these fields. His research and publications are described in his website jila.colorado.edu/~jlinsky/. His CV is included in the website under the topic "Biography".

Seth Redfield is the Fisk Professor of Natural Science and Professor of Astronomy at Wesleyan University, home to the Van Vleck Observatory. His research centers on the physical properties and structure of the local interstellar medium—the gas and dust in our immediate Galactic environment—and its interaction with stars and planetary systems. Using high-resolution spectroscopy from major ground-based observatories and space facilities, he investigates both the interstellar material surrounding the Sun and the atmospheres of exoplanets.
He has been awarded observing time on leading facilities including the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope and serves on the Science Team of NASA’s New Horizons mission, which, after its encounter with Pluto, is now exploring the outer heliosphere and traveling toward the local interstellar medium.
Professor Redfield is the author of more than 200 refereed journal articles spanning the local interstellar medium, stars and their circumstellar environments, and exoplanetary science. He co-authored the most recent comprehensive review of the local interstellar medium in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. His work includes the first morphological and kinematic maps of the interstellar clouds directly surrounding the Sun, pioneering ground-based detections of exoplanet atmospheres, measurements of astrospheres—the interfaces between stellar winds and interstellar material—and the discovery of a near-resonant three-super-Earth system around a nearby star. More than one-third of his publications have been produced in collaboration with Wesleyan undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers.
He lives in Wethersfield, Connecticut, with his wife and three children.