EDITORIAL: Statement of purpose
The field of star clusters, embedded, open or globular, is expanding rapidly on the observational side, thanks to astrometric, spectroscopic, and photometric surveys or catalogues. On the theoretical side, progress in stellar evolution models and computational N-body techniques, allowing star-by-star modelling of clusters, already rejuvenate the field.
We will anticipate more and more activity in the near future in this area of research due to the Gaia satellite mission, hence there is a need to disseminate summaries of activity covering all aspects of work on star cluster: refereed publications naturally, but also forthcoming conferences, recent PhD summaries, planned surveys, links to relevant databases, or job(s) opportunities.
We expect that even in times of social networks and preprint servers, such a newsletter can help to provide an overview of recent activities in the field and to bring people together. SCYON, this newsletter, will be published once every three months. If the number of contributions justifies it, we would move toward more frequent issues in order to keep the newsletter relatively short, manageable for us, and up-to-date. However, your contributions will be available on the webpages within a few days.
Interested? If you are, and would like to contribute to the newsletter, please register, distribute the availability of the newsletter to colleagues, submit your new abstracts, and send all kinds of announcements.
The newsletter can only prosper with your help!
SCYON policy
SCYON publishes abstracts from any area in astronomy which is relevant to research on star clusters. It includes
- Abstracts from refereed articles
- Abstracts from conference proceedings
- PhD Summaries
- Announcements : Conferences, new databases or surveys, tools, jobs etc.
We remind you that we want to keep the newsletter as topical as possible, thus we do not accept 'older' papers. If the paper has already appeared in a journal, the publication date should not be before the last SCYON issue.
We also offer the possibility to report 'small discoveries'. These would be results that per se do not make or justify a paper, but that can be of interest for our cluster community. A figure and some text would be enough.
Concerning possible infringements to copyright laws, we understand that the authors themselves are taking responsibility for the material they send us. We make no claim whatsoever to owning the material that is posted at our webpages or circulated by email. The newsletter SCYON is a free, no-strings-attached service. It does not substitute for our personal opinions, nor does it reflect in any way the views of our respective institutes of affiliations.
Abstracts can be submitted at any time either by using the latex abstract template or directly with the webform. We much prefer contributors to use the webform, since it is mostly automated and it also guarantees the quickest access to it for others. Please refrain from sending postscript files or encoded mail attachments. Soon after your submission, your abstract will be visible on the preview page of the next issue.
Latex commands will be displayed on the webpages using MathJax (as also used by ArXiv), but please refrain from using too complex TeX macros, it will complicate matters! However all abstracts/contributions sent to us will be processed, but we reserve the right to not post abstracts submitted to us in the wrong format or which don't compile. If you experience any sort of problems accessing the web site, or anything, please write to us.
A "Call for abstracts" is sent out approximately one week before the next issue of the newsletter is finalised.
We implicitly encourage further dissemination of the newsletter to institutes and astronomers who may benefit from it.
The Editor team: Angela Adamo, Martin Netopil, and Ernst Paunzen