Today was a very low-research day. But I did get in a good phonecall with Lily Zhao (Yale) and Megan Bedell (Flatiron) about what's next, now that Zhao has submitted her paper on Excalibur, which is our hierarchical, non-parametric model for spectrograph calibration. In the submitted version, she finds that running Excalibur improves calibration of the EXPRES spectrograph over the standard pipeline by an amount that corresponds to removing an additive source of noise with a rms of 62 cm/s! So we really are improving the output of the hardware with sensible, well thought-out software.
Now that this calibration paper is done, we have decided to swing our focus over onto an activity challenge, in which teams compete to model and remove stellar-activity noise in radial-velocity signals. The challenge will come with raw spectra, so we work in this at the pixel level, which, as my loyal reader knows, is where I think all the innovation is possible.
In group meeting today, I had the group comment on my nascent mission statement for the Astronomical Data Group.
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