[Okay now I'm really trying to get back to blogging my research. If you out there are having trouble getting things done: I hear you. I have done very little in this time of quarantine, and I'm trying to be kind to myself about it (and not always succeeding). Take care of yourselves out there.]
The only research I did today was a couple of phone calls. The first was with Christina Eilers (MIT) about determining and implementing a selection function for the APOGEE spectroscopic survey, and using it to measure the scale length of the disk. This is a bit of a boring project! But it would lead to lots of follow-on projects. A good selection function makes you very powerful! For example, the spiral structure we see in kinematics would become abundantly clear in stellar density if we had a selection function and an azimuthally-averaged mean model for the disk.
The other phone call was with Jason Hunt (Flatiron). He has a medium-term goal of applying the made-to-measure method of modeling stellar systems to the entirety of the ESA Gaia data set. I love that goal! We discussed changes to M2M to let it be more responsible with noisy and incomplete data. We resolved that Hunt would teach me M2M in our next (remote) meeting.
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