I just returned from an off-grid eclipse trip; hence no posting. Also, it was vacation! The total eclipse (which I saw in central Oregon) was extremely dramatic: The air got cold, the sky got so dark we could see the stars, and there was a quasi-sunset around all the horizon. The corona of the Sun could be seen, during totality, out to more than a Solar Diameter off the limb of the Sun. During late stages of partiality, the shadows created an amazing demonstration of the sense in which a shadow is a convolution of a mask with the illumination, and how that convolution depends on distance (between the object and its shadow). I have much more to say about all this (and photographs), but I will save it for one of my other blogs!
The only research I did during the week was discussion of near-term projects with Bernhard Schölkopf (MPI-IS) and Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA), which will involve building latent-variable models (and related things) on stellar spectra. In some down time, Schölkopf also helped me with some non-trivial linear algebra!
No comments:
Post a Comment