Commission 45: Stellar Classification

1. Business The Business Meeting of Commission 45 was held on 16 August 2006. It was attended by the president and vice-president of the Commission as well as by twenty other members of the Commission. Attendance was limited, as usual, by the unavoidable occurrence of parallel sessions. The memories of our colleague Dr. Charles Perry were recalled at the meeting. Subsequently in September 2006, and with deep regret, we learnt of the death of Dr. Laura Pasinetti, one of the retiring members of the Organizing Committee. New members of the IAU who are known to be joining Commission 45 are Carlos Allende Prieto, Cassio L. Barbosa, Johan Holmberg, Yuri V. Pakhomov, and Allyn John Smith. These were warmly welcomed. The President reported that a proposal, initiated by the Commission, for an IAU Joint Discussion during the IAU XXVI General Assembly on Exploiting Large Surveys for Galactic Astronomy had been approved by the Executive Committee. Vigorous support from four participating Divisions and five additional Commissions, leading to a Scientific Organizing Committee of ten persons, had resulted in a stimulating programme. The main goals of this Joint Discussion were to review the major surveys in astronomy whose targets are stars, to appreciate the scientific goals and the byproducts of these surveys with respect to our understanding of Galactic astronomy, to consider how well the techniques employed achieve these goals, and to exchange ideas on how best to exploit the opportunities of future surveys. A report of this meeting is given in Highlights of Astronomy, Volume 14 (CUP, 2007, ed. K.A. van der Hucht), and full proceedings are published in the Memorie della Societá Astronomica Italiana, volume 77, n.4. The president also drew the attention of the meeting to the Commission 45 contribution to Transactions IAU XXVIA, Reports on Astronomy 2002-2005 (CUP, 2007, ed. O. Engvold), where activity in stellar classification over the last several years is cited, and he thanked all the contributors to this report. Two major developments have been the unification of the T-dwarf standards and an ongoing project, the new general catalogue of stellar spectral classification by Brian Skiff. See <http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=III/233B>. The third major activity of Commission 45, the Working Group on Standard Stars, and the production of its newsletter is reported in the following pages of these Transactions.