AAS meeting, day two

I actually did some work at the Google booth helping people to operate Sky. The day was filled with discussion about how to make Sky more useful as a scientific tool, by, for example creating mash-ups with data archives. The nice thing is that Sky has an easy API, so this can be done by third parties (such as myself). One problem with trying to make progress at a meeting is that usually all you can do is plan more meetings.

I learned stuff about APOGEE (a part of SDSS-III) from, among other people, Nick Konidaris (UCSC) and Ricardo Schiavon (UVa). It will obtain high precision velocities and information about some dozen elements for 100,000 stars with a R=20,000 infrared spectrograph. This really provides qualitatively new information about the Milky Way.