A Census of Massive Stars Across the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram of Nearby Galaxies: What We Know and What We Don't

When we look at a nearby galaxy, we see a mixture of foreground stars and bona fide extragalactic stars. I will describe what we need to do to get meaningful statistics on the massive star populations across the H-R diagram. Such a census provides the means of a very powerful test of massive star evolutionary theory.