One of the nice features of putting technical, scientific material on the Web is that anyone can surf in and see what's going on in the world of professional science. Often all the public gets about scientific discoveries are dumbed-down (and therefore somewhat inaccurate, or at least incomplete) sound bites, leaving the real story as well-hidden as before. In this site you will find a decidely not-dumbed-down version of two days in the lives of 31 professional astronomers.

These pages contain the proceedings of a scientific conference held on October 6 and 7, 1997 at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The purpose of this conference was to discuss Solar analogs -- which stars in the sky are most similar to our own Sun. If you plow through all the material in these pages, you'll see that this is an important, and difficult, question to answer.

Proceedings are written versions of scientific conferences. Astronomers who attended the meeting submit written versions of their contribution to it, which the editor then compiles into a single volume.

You'll find several kinds of contributions in these pages.

• Invited talks: The conference organizer usually invites a number of astronomers to speak at the conference. These speakers created a written version of their talk after the conference.

• Contributed posters: Many astronomers offer to make a presentation at the conference, even if they haven't been specifically invited to. Many of these contributions take the form of posters, which are really just high-level versions of those posterboard displays you made for grade-school science fairs. The astronomers who contributed posters to the meeting also made separate written versions of them for the proceedings.

• Discussions: It's standard practice in scientific circles to have a question-and-answer session following a talk, so that the audience can discuss, or in some cases, grill the speaker about his or her statements and results. This is the essence of science: all statements must be open to inquiry, skepticism, and testing before acceptance. We taped all the discussions during our conference, and have included the transcripts in the proceedings. There are brief discussions after each talk, two long general discussions, and four extemporaneous presentations during the "panel discussion" session. We have edited the transcripts to preserve the flavor of the spoken word, which is very different from the written word. Hopefully it will be interesting reading how 31 astronomers from around the world debated the complex issues before them.

Jeffrey Hall
Editor, Solar Analogs Workshop proceedings
Lowell Observatory