Today was exoplanet day at our undisclosed location. Quintana and Barclay (both Ames) were in the house; we worked with Barclay on some of the new K2 data. Foreman-Mackey worked on building a physical model along the lines of our white paper. I worked on making optimized aperture photometry. The latter worked well, at least relative to anything the Kepler team has done so far. The K2 pointing and precision is good, but not nearly as good as in the Kepler era. That said, I think we can recover most of the precision through Good Data Analysis (tm). (Just like we said in the white paper.)
Wolfgang (UCSC) told us about her model for the period distribution of exoplanets, which she is implementing in JAGS. We gave her suggestions for enfastenating it. The key idea is that, in her framework, it might be better to model the observed distribution of transiting exoplanets, rather than the true distribution of (either transiting or not) exoplanets. In the latter case you do a lot of modeling of planets you will never see. Or at least not in Kepler.
Because both the exoplanet people and the star-formation people (Conroy, Weisz, Johnson of UCSC) are using Gaussian processes, Foreman-Mackey was pressed into an impromptu tutorial in the afternoon. He rocked it, and Conroy encouraged us in no uncertain terms to write it up in the Data Analysis Recipes series.
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