black-hole binaries, image formation

After getting back on the red-eye, I attended a nice seminar by Mike Eracleous (Penn State) about black-hole binaries. He is a bit more optimistic than I am about finding and confirming them, and about their usefulness. But we had near-simultaneous papers on the subject this year. In the afternoon, Fergus and I continued our debates about how to model speckles in the 1640 coronograph data. The issues are all about how to make the model so flexible that it can fit all the speckles, but so constrained that it does not at the same time want to fit out the companion (think exoplanet). Out most insane idea is to fit for the electric field in the camera! But that, I think, is hard.