Toronto

I spent the day in Toronto, where I gave the Astronomy Colloquium. Ray Carlberg mentioned (perhaps critically) that my talk was a bit more technical than usual for this venue. Oh well! In the morning I spoke with David Law (Dunlap) about how the MANGA project intends to go from spectral pixel data to imaging spectroscopic intensity voxel. They plan to go through a "spectral extraction" step which is very sensible and practical, but probably at least somewhat lossy. We discussed what could be better.

In the afternoon I spoke with Peter Martin (CITA) and Amir Hajian (CITA), both of whom are working with multi-wavelength data of very varied angular resolution, although in very different contexts. I argued for forward modeling (duh!) for both, but also sparse (compressed sensing) dictionary methods for Hajian, whose CMB-contaminating point sources are very distinct in support and spectrum from the CMB.

In the evening, I had dinner with the graduate students. We talked about realism, and the possible reactions to the issue that all models are (or must be) wrong.