Posters from the edge of the universe

The poster session at a conference typically represents the future of a subject for several reasons. First, the presenters are often graduate/research students and postdoctoral fellows, who will be working in the field when the rest of us have joined Eddington and Russell. Second, many of the posters are progress reports on interesting projects not yet complete. And, third, some of them present ideas far enough outside the mainstream that they are not represented in the oral program. This last seems to be less common at meetings on stellar astrophysics than in, say, cosmology or astrobiology. All posters actually displayed during the first three days of the meeting are mentioned here at least briefly. © 2010 Elsevier B.V