Astrometry.net went beta today. If you want to try out the new site, check out nova, our new image-sharing site. Note that we don't guarantee data integrity, so don't use us as a data backup system! But I think you will like what our Google Summer of Code interns, Kevin Chen and Carlos Lalimarmo, have done. Also, of course, huge effort from Lang. I am infinitely pleased.
Foreman-Mackey finished demonstrating to me that his Stripe 82 calibration process is working correctly and giving precise zeropoints for even the non-photometric runs (or at least as precise as possible) in the multi-epoch data set. He also has one candidate RR Lyrae star at enormous distance (it would be the most distant Milky Way RRL star ever, if it is real).
Nao Suzuki gave a nice talk in Hennawi's group meeting about things you can do with empirical (read PCA, which should make me groan, but he is doing good things with them) models of quasar spectra. In particular he has a very nice model-free way to estimate (under some strong but fairly reasonable assumptions) the attenuation of Lyman-alpha photons as a function of redshift. He does not confirm multiple reports of a feature at redshift around 3.2.
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