going alpha

The astrometry.net team (Blanton, Finkbeiner, Hogg, Lang, Masjedi, Mierle, Roweis) got very close to going alpha on the WWW today. Blanton, Fink, and Roweis wrote the FITS-image-to-star-x-y-list code, Hogg and Fink worked through the tweak code, Mierle started on the WWW interface, Masjedi worked on improving the USNO-B1.0 input catalogs, and Lang and Mierle worked on the blind solving indices. It would be nice to go alpha this week, if we can. And Willman will be our first alpha user. We worked hard today.