raw data, uv flares

First thing in the morning, I broke it to Jeffrey Mei that his results on spectral features associated with MW dust are almost certainly strongly affected by the SDSS spectroscopic calibration pipeline. He took it well, and we realized that we can just re-run our analysis on the completely uncalibrated spectrograph counts! This might just work. He is tasked with understanding how to access the raw counts from the SDSS-III spectroscopic pipeline.

At arXiv coffee, Patel summarized two papers by Gezari and collaborators on discoveries in GALEX and PanSTARRS time-domain data: A shock breakout flash at the start of a supernova and a putative tidal-disruption flare from a star destroyed by a close encounter with a black hole. These results provide a strict lower limit to what we might find in a search of the GALEX photon list.