2007-09-24

ADASS, day 1

I gave my talk at the ADASS meeting today. I was followed by Warren Hack (STScI), who demonstrated a nice, robust, hybrid scheme for aligning overlapping astronomical images precisely, even when those images contain very few (or no!) point sources, time-variable and moving sources, and cosmic rays. It could be a great back end for Astrometry.net.

Before Hack and me, there were talks about data preservation and archives, which emphasized the complexities and difficulties of preserving not just the data and meta data but an understanding of what it all means, which is currently preserved in people's heads. Bob Hanisch (STScI) gave a great talk about the VO which went beyond—and made specific—some ideas I have been floating around in one of my polemics, involving the relationships among data and code and the papers based on those data and that code. He agreed with me that incremental adoption of this kind of radical association will be fraught with cultural and political difficulties.

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