The astronomers are involved in a project which is on the brink of proving there are planets orbiting distant stars.
The meeting was originally planned to be in Baltimore in the United States.
But they decided to move it to Tasmania to publicise the light pollution problem Mt Canopus observatory at Mornington faces from the threat of nearby higher-density residential rezoning.
The observatory is a vital link in a world-wide network called PLANET, short for Probing Lensing Anomalies Network.
The man in charge of the observatory's part in the six-nation project, former senior lecturer in physics at the University of Tasmania John Greenhill, said yesterday if dark skies weren't maintained over Mt Canopus it would seriously affect the search for planets outside our solar system.
"The fact that my PLANET colleagues - who work as far away as Perth, the US, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Chile and South Africa - agreed to move the meeting here shows how strongly they feel about the need to keep our observatory on line," Dr Greenhill said.
"We've invited the Mayor of Clarence, Cathy Edwards, to a function at Mt Canopus on Sunday night to impress on I her the importance of not letting light pollution interfere with our work.
"The exciting thing about the project is that in a year or two we will be able to make a definitive statement on how many stars have - planets orbiting them, at what distance and what the mass of those planets are.
"I believe there are millions of stars out there with planetary systems, so the mathematical chances of finding life on some of those planets is quite high."
The search for planets around stars is done through a process called gravitational microlensing.
"It's a natural process Albert Einstein predicted in the 1920s and occurs when a closer star passes in front of a more distant star," Dr Greenhill said,
"Detailed study of the light curve induced by gravitation can provide information
about any planets which may be associated with the foreground star and important
details about the background star which can't be obtained in any other way."