I spent the day talking with Bolton and Lang (and, variously, Blanton and Bovy) about modeling images and spectra. We principally debated what advantages you will or could get in data analysis by building good models of the raw data at the pixel level. We all have intuitions that it will be good, but we have few concrete examples. We assigned Bovy one task along these lines: Show that the SDSS astrometry of point sources could or would be much better if we re-centroid using a PSF fit rather than the (approximate) thing done by the pipelines at present.
In the afternoon, I made the difficult decision to drop my robotic telescope proposal for NYU Abu Dhabi and the NYU Global Campus. This is a great project, which we might resurrect, but I am feeling stretched too far and I need more time to understand my research program in the post-Roweis period. Argh.
Hogg -- The image modeling approach is basically what's done for stellar photometry of crowded fields. The model consists of large numbers of point sources, whose fluxes are fit simultaneously within and across images to minimize residuals. Much easier place to start than arbitrary images...
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