2011-03-18

how to frame a comet

Lang and I added parameters to our Comet Holmes model that capture the statistics of where an astrophotographer locates her or his subject within the frame. These seemed to improve our model likelihood, confirming intuitions from Iain Murray. Oddly we are learning a lot more in this project about astrophotographers than we are about comets! We also figured out by detective work that this image (below), which was torquing some of our fits, is not an image of Comet Holmes, but rather a faint galaxy!

2 comments:

  1. What are you learning about astrophotographers?

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  2. Well for one, we have learned that they tend to put their comets in the central 1/e (yes, an eth) of the image footprint (solid angle).

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