2005-07-19

HST archive, catching up

Phil Marshall and I worked on putting a huge query into the HST Archive, and hit many snags, most of which derive from the fact that HST is not expecting people to query for 42,000 exposures in one shot. I can't imagine why not. No, I am not kidding: aren't we in the world of big data? Anyway, we failed, but the super-helpful people at STScI are on the case and I think we will be able to do a huge query by the end of the week. Interestingly, the STScIers want us to do a huge query to put their system through its paces.

Blanton and I caught up on a lot, as did Eisenstein and I (by phone); Blanton has some extremely good results on the evolution of galaxies as observed and predicted, and nice work reducing the dimensionality of galaxy spectral variations, conditioned on realistic (read: possible) star-formation histories. Eisenstein (with Burles and Alison Coil) has a great project to take massive numbers of redshifts using a prism rather than a grism or grating.

No comments:

Post a Comment