After a short vacation in Maine I came back refreshed to work on blind astrometry with Sam and Morad. Sam successfully solved the first-ever SDSS field totally blind, but it was slow because he encountered statistics of false matches that we had not expected. We re-worked the numbers for the millionth time and everything checks out okay. We discussed numerous ways to make everything faster, and we may have settled on a faster scheme, but one that ties the angular scale of the indexed stellar quadrangles to the number density (on the sky) of the magnitude-limited catalog used to construct them. We also tasked Sam and his (future) students with coding work.
Noreen Grice is the world's only blind astronomer, and she has beautifully captured her unique world in her book Touch the Universe (Joseph Henry Press).
ReplyDeleteKurt: Actually, there are several blind astronomers. But Touch the Universe is certainly a unique book.
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