The table is designed to be read given a spectral classification or brightness for the star.  For example, let's assume that a science fiction writer desires to set a story around the star gamma Virginis, which he or she finds is an F0 main sequence star.  Reading across the table in the F0 row he or she finds (to the left) that the star has a bolometric magnitude of 2.75.  Reading right he or she finds that the star is pale blue.  (See this note on the color columns.)  The life zone has a radius of about 2.5 astronomical units and the year is about 1150 days long.  The star appears in the sky from the life zone to be about 0.64 times the size that the sun appears in our sky.  The visible light on the planet is about 0.97 times as bright as it is on Earth (see this note), and the sunburn causing UV rays are about 1.9 times as intense.  The last three columns give data on the star itself (its radius, temperature, and mass) which were used to generate the preceding information.

The table was generated using bolometric magnitude as the independent variable.  The radius of the life zone is determined by that, with an error of 5%.  All other properties require reliance on the relationships between star mass, radius, luminosity, and temperature, which are rarely more accurate than 10%.  In addition there are probably systematic problems. The most serious of these is that stars that are redder or bluer than the sun will deposit more energy into the upper atmosphere of a planet than the sun does to Earth.  The balance on Earth between energy deposited into the upper atmosphere vs. onto the ground determines the elevation of the tropopause, which in turn governs our weather.  To prevent the tropopause from being too low to allow weather, planets around blue and red stars would have to reside farther from their sun in order to permit weather, so the practical life zone for such stars is probably farther out (and colder) than indicated in the table.  For stars that are too red or blue, simultaneously maintaining an earthlike temperature and permitting rain is probably impossible.

It is recommended that one unfamiliar with astronomy first read the Short Explanation of Stars as well as the information on each column linked at the column title.  This is particularly true for color information, since the true color and apparent color are usually vastly different because of the effects of visual processing in the brain.  For example, the world will not appear red-orange around 12.5 magnitude Wolf 359, because our eyes would level out the color imbalance.  As an example, the filament in an incandescent bulb is actually orange, but when we reside in a room where that is the only light, it appears white.  If you look at a bulb from the outside while your eyes are adapted to sunlight, or photograph the bulb with a camera and film set up to photograph bright sunlit scenes, it will appear orange.

Most of the data used to generate the table were gleened from Kenneth R. Lang, Astrophysical Data: Planets and Stars (Springer-Verlag, 1992). Other information was derived directly from the H. R. diagrams produced by the Hipparcos Astrometry Mission and available at: http://astro.estec.esa.nl/Hipparcos/