Preface - SpS8 - The Galactic Plane

The first digital astronomical surveys emphasised exploration of the sky away from the crowded Galactic Plane. But now, increased computing power has made it possible to take on comprehensive surveying of the Galactic Plane even at high spatial resolution and down to faint magnitude limits. A number of ambitious wide-area surveys sampling high energies, optical wavelengths, the infrared, sub-millimetre and radio ranges are complete, in process, or about to begin. The goals of these surveys are as broad as Galactic science itself, but are mainly focused either on solving key problems in star formation and stellar evolution, or on mapping the complex substructures of the Galactic bulge and disk in order to see more clearly how the whole is constructed. This meeting brought together researchers directly involved in the many surveys, along with specialists in the observations and modelling of the ISM, stellar evolution, and the structure of the Galactic Disk and Bulge.