ETA CARINAE AND ITS ENVIRONMENT

Eta Carinae (Eta) is one of the most remarkable of all well-studied stars and perhaps the most poorly understood. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and other modern instruments have solved a few of the 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 observational and theoretical problems that seem especially interesting or important at this time.