2011-06-16

Very Wide Field Surveys, day 4

The most surprising thing I learned today was from Benitez about the JPAS survey, a Spain–Brazil collaboration to do 56-band imaging to get large-scale structure. It is an ambitious project, and designed for maximum efficiency. It is also funded; I will be interested to see it proceed.

Talks by Richards, Bernstein, and Willman all set me up nicely; they all said that source classification and characterization at low signal-to-noise is extremely important scientifically, very difficult, and essentially probabilistic. They all showed incredible things we could do with respect to quasar science, weak lensing, and Local Group discovery if we can classify things properly at the faint end. After this crew, Gray, Lupton, and I spoke about computational methods, with Gray concentrating on classes of problems and the algorithms to make them fast and effective, me concentrating on producing probabilistic outputs (that is, no more hard, final, static catalogs), and Lupton talking about how it worked in SDSS and how it could work better in LSST and HSC. Lupton's talk closed the meeting, and it was a pleasure!

One constant note throughout the meeting, and especially today, was that a lot of science and discovery was enabled by the exquisite photometric calibration of the SDSS. I am proud of my (admittedly very small) contributions to that effort and the enormous amount they have paid off in so many areas.

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