discussions and data

Friday was all talk, with Tim McKay (Michigan), Sheldon, and I discussing SDSS measurements of intercluster light in the morning. At group meeting, McKay spoke about his very rapid follow-up of GRBs with ROTSE-III, and Blanton spoke about the Tully-Fisher relation for S0 ("ess zero") galaxies (about which he learned in New Zealand). At lunch, Schiminovich and I looked at some PRIMUS spectra of UV-luminous galaxies; I am not sure he was impressed! Before the seminar, Pizagno and Tatjana Vavilkin (Stony Brook) discussed with me more physical approaches to creating mass images out of the SDSS data, using stellar population synthesis images. At our weekly astro seminar, McKay worked through cosmology with optically (I think he meaned visually) detected galaxy clusters, from soup to nuts.

This weekend, I blew large amounts of testbed data into the pre-alpha astrometry.net engine. All of the images I sent were examples of images that previously failed to solve. This time, almost all of them solved, so I think we are close. Most of these testbed images came from our future alpha users; I learned that some of them gave us some pretty mean images to solve!