Marshall showed up for a couple of days of hacking. He appealed to my sense of irresponsibility to convince me not to work on much more pressing things, like letters of recommendation, mid-term exams, hallowe'en costumes, and other matters that don't constitute research (consult rules at right). We discovered that the PanSTARRS preliminary catalogs might not have the angular resolution (or, perhaps, deblending aggression) we would like in order to use them to find gravitational lenses. The experience will lead to feedback that will (we hope) improve the PanSTARRS software, but they remind me of the great opportunities that could be afforded if we had a probabilistic framework for producing catalogs from imaging. I should work on that!
PanSTARRS problems are much deeper than the way how the catalogs are made. If they ever solve the detector problems and write a decent detection software (sextractor alike), people should feel relieved.
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