made-to-measure; centroiding

I had a good conversation with Jason Hunt (Flatiron) today about the made-to-measure method of fitting observed kinematic data with equilibrium dynamical models. Hunt and collaborators have taken M2M from being an old-school method that works in the (indirectly and noisily observed) space of six-dimensional phase-space coordinates to something more observational. But not all the way to a fully data-centric model. I think it might be possible. And it relates to Hunt's big goal of applying M2M responsibly to the entire ESA Gaia data set. That's the kind of ambitious goal I can get behind! Late in the day I spent some time working out ideas of how we might make the M2M comparison between model and data as responsible as possible.

I also spoke with Lily Zhao (Yale) about centroiding spectral lines in a laser-frequency comb exposure with the EXPRES spectrograph. I said that we ought to try our polynomial fitting approximate methods there. They work well in multiple settings.