Introduction

Abstract

This chapter presents a general introduction to planetary nebulae and their importance as probes of stellar and galactic evolution. We begin with a historical overview detailing their discovery and some of the major advances which brought us our current understanding of their formation and origins. We will then discuss the standard stellar evolutionary models believed to lead to the formation of a planetary nebula, including the expected relationships between main sequence mass and the chemical properties of the final nebula. Finally, we outline the importance of planetary nebulae in chemically enriching the interstellar medium (and thus future generations of stars), their use in the study of galactic dynamics, distances and chemical gradients, and—most interestingly in the context of this work—their value as probes of binary stellar evolution.