Very Wide Field Surveys, day 1

Today was the first day of Very Wide Field Surveys in the Light of Astro2010 in Baltimore. The talks were overwhelmingly extragalactic in emphasis, and there were many about not-yet-taken data. Highlights for me included: Jim Gunn (Princeton) making some of Blanton and my work on galaxies in SDSS his prime motivation for his new projects; Martha Haynes (Cornell) showing examples of dark galaxies from ALFALFA that contain substantial HI gas but no stars to the limits of very deep optical imaging; Matt Jarvis (Hertfordshire) explaining that LOFAR and similar surveys record the amplitudes and phases from many antennae, but then delete them after map-making, so certain kinds of reanalyses will be impossible, no matter what; Chris Martin (Caltech) showing one of the eclipsing binaries found by Schiminovich, Lang, and me in the GALEX data; Ned Wright (UCLA) showing an incredibly low-temperature brown dwarf (maybe the lowest ever?) from WISE; Steve Warren (Imperial) showing an embargoed (very) high-redshift quasar from UKIDSS with a beautiful spectrum and praising Daniel Mortlock for his excellent target-selection skills; and a great pair of rapid-fire poster sessions in which each poster at the meeting got one viewgraph and exactly sixty seconds of summary time. Many luminaries are present at the meeting, and many old friends too (and some in both categories simultaneously).