Harvard

I spent the day at Harvard CfA, giving a seminar and discussing various things with the locals. Among other things I learned: Doug Finkbeiner and Mario Juric have a re-calibration for PanSTARRS that looks very promising. They also built fast technology to implement it (and other scientific investigations with the large data set). Kaisey Mandel (with Bob Kirshner) has a hierarchical model for supernovae light-curves that uses all bands simultaneously, including the important H band, and fits simultaneously for dust extinction and light-curve properties. He appears to be able to improve distance indication by tens of percent, which is a big deal in this area. Alyssa Goodman, Gus Muench, and others have been working on crazy new stuff for coordinated literature and sky searching, including unpacking the NASA ADS data and doing things like making higher-end text search but also running the in-line images into Astrometry.net and building a sky index. Dinner (and drinks after) were great too.

The only bad thing—or I should say sad thing—is that one of the great pleasures for me of visiting the CfA has always been hanging out with John Huchra. What a loss for all of us.