The day started with a call with Rory Holmes about our nearly-finished paper on self-calibration of imaging surveys. One of the things we discussed was journal choice. Not an easy one. We also agreed to move to git and cloud-based code hosting.
Later in the day, Fouesneau (UW), Weisz (UW), and I worked on issues of completeness, cluster membership posterior probabilities, and radial-profile fitting. On the latter point, Fouesneau pointed out that the errors in the measurements of the radial profiles (which are photometric) are probably under-estimated because they are generated by shot noise not in the number of photons, but in the number of stars, which have a huge dynamic range in brightness. He doesn't trust the uncertainties that are reported to him. Not having the ability to re-do the error analysis, we discussed the various things that the uncertainties could depend on, among the data outputs and model inputs we do have. Once we had that written down, we realized that we could just parameterize the dependence of the uncertainties on the measured and model quantities, and fit for them. We pair-coded that in Fouesneau's sandbox and it worked! So we might be treating uncertainties in the way they deserve. It reminded me of conversations I have had in the past with Brendon Brewer (UCSB).
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