Understanding Lyα emitters

This publication contains the conference summary of the Understanding Lyα Emitters conference held at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg October 6 10, 2008. The scope of the conference was to bring together most of the scientists working in the field of Lyα emitters, whether at low or high redshift, or on observational or theoretical aspects, and to summarise how far the field of study of galaxies with Lyα emission has come. An outlook towards the future of the field was also desired. As part of the conference, two days were dedicated to in total six discussion sessions. The topics were i) new methods and selection methods, ii) morphology, iii) what can the local Universe observations tell us about the high redshift Universe?, iv) clustering, v) SED fitting and vi) Lyα blobs. The chairs of those sessions were asked to summarise the discussions, as presented in these proceedings.