Roweis and I discussed the next steps in the astrometry.net project, some of which Mulin has already done, because he has our new machine up and running and on the net with a static IP. I am pretty confident (on the basis of no data) that we will be able to solve Schiminovich's GALEX field, but that is yet to get underway. We discussed some small non-uniformities in the USNO-B1.0 catalog that appear to be related to the photographic plate mapping pattern on the sky. We made some hypotheses about what they are, none of the hypotheses were good!
Willman, Ronin Wu, and I discussed Wu's project to re-determine the properties of Virgo Cluster galaxies. Her plots look great and she is starting to write up the method into a proto-paper. I think there is a lot to do with this data set. Willman mentioned vanGorkom's beautiful HI data on Virgo; I should go up to Columbia and ask for an audience!
Rebecca Bernstein gave a great talk about chemical abundances in globular clusters. She explained how chemical abundances are related to formation history of galaxy stellar populations. More impressively, she explained in detail how chemical abundances can be determined with observations of stars and (harder) with observations of compact populations of stars. All this work was done with a spectrograph she built herself, so it was an impressive show as well as being informative.
No comments:
Post a Comment