At Milky Way group meeting I got all crazy about the fact that there are all these multi-element chemical abundance surveys starting, taking great spectra of giant stars, but there is no evidence (yet) that anyone can actually measure the detailed abundances in any giant stars, even given great data. I exhorted everyone to look at the APOGEE data, which are beautiful and plentiful and ought to be good enough to do this science. Any improvement in their ability to measure chemical abundances will be richly rewarded.
In the afternoon I spoke with Beth Biller (MPIA) and Ian Crossfield (MPIA) about possibly constraining the long-period planet distribution using single-transit objects in the Kepler data (that is, stellar light curves for which a single transit is observed and nothing else). This is an idea from the exoSAMSI meeting a few months ago. We decided that it would probably not be a good idea to do this with a single-transit catalog that doesn't also have a good estimate of completeness and purity and so on. That is, Biller and Crossfield were (rightly) suspicious when I said maybe we could just fit the completeness function hyper-parameters along with the population hyper-parameters! That said, they were both optimistic that this could work. I wrote to Meg Schwamb (Taipei) about her (possibly existing) single-transit catalog from PlanetHunters.
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