Tuesday, June 10 - Plenary Session

Name:  Jeffrey Hall

Affiliation:  Lowell Observatory

Title:  Sixty Years (and Counting) of Stargazing: Synoptic Observations of Sun-Like Stars

Abstract:
The Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO) HK Project ran from 1966 to 2003 and is the landmark data set that revealed the ensemble of variations, cyclic and otherwise, in cool stars. The Lowell Observatory Solar-Stellar Spectrograph (SSS) project has operated since 1994; it includes some MWO stars but also the Sun itself and all solar analogs to V ~7.5. Decades of comparable solar observations have been accumulated at the NSO. Long-term photometric monitoring of Sun-like stars, including many of the MWO and SSS stars, continues today at the Fairborn Observatory south of Tucson. Numerous other synoptic programs have been carried out from the ground and in space. I will review the advantages (and perils) of carrying out the same observations for decades, key results, promising lines of work for the future, and the insights and benefit to the community of a full combination of the data sets – this having been done to some extent but not comprehensively.