If yesterday was day 3, then the one-day working meeting on Monday regarding SDSS-IV was day zero, and today—a working meeting for SDSS-V—was day 3+1. The highlight for me today was a discussion led by Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA) and Kevin Covey (WWU) of what we might do with extra fiber–visits.
SDSS-V is a robot-positioned multi-object fiber-fed spectroscopic survey, with both optical and infrared spectrographs. It works in a few modes, but most of them involve jumping around the sky, taking (relatively) short spectroscopic observations of hundreds of stars at a time. The operations are complex: There are multiple target categories with different cadence requirements, and there are positional constraints on what the fiber robots can do. All this means that there are many, many (like millions of) unassigned fiber–visits.
The range of projects proposed was breathtaking, from Cepheids to microlensing events to nearby galaxy redshifts to quasar catalogs. And all of them so clever and thought-out that they were all compelling. And this wasn't even an official call for proposals: It was just a brainstorming session. Towards the end, there were some ideas (that I loved) about taking a union of the star-oriented suggestions and making a project with excellent data volume and legacy value. I love this Collaboration.
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