Tucson firehose

After my Colloquium here at Steward Observatory plus NOAO, Buell Jannuzi (NOAO) told me that I had, in a one hour talk, perfectly simulated a AAS session: My talk consisted of five ten-minute talks, each of which was intriguing and depressing in a different way! I took that as a compliment.

I also had nice conversations with Todd Lauer (NOAO) about image processing and data modeling in general. We discussed, among many other things, what the relationship might be between a model of a full set of overlapping images and a co-add of deconvolved images (with suitable priors, I presume). These two things might look very similar, if the deconvolution is light and the variations among the images is not too large. We also discussed when it makes sense to do the Right Thing (tm) when the Simplest Thing (tm) is much easier to understand and use.

At dinner I spoke with many of the graduate students, which was a pleasure. I learned that Ken Wong (Steward, of PRIMUS fame, among other things) has executed a pie-in-the-sky idea of Ann Zabludoff's (Steward): Find lines of sight in SDSS that are highly likely to have high magnification from lensing by superimposed galaxy groups and clusters. This is not trivial because the relationship (at group and cluster scale) between dark matter and galaxies is not trivial.