a better catalog

One thing I didn't mention about the awesome day yesterday is that Marshall and I scoped (not scooped, scoped) two papers on PanSTARRS-like data. One involves making a super-simple catalog from the imaging, a catalog made up of a mixture of Gaussians (and nothing else, not even PSF determination). Marshall has the intuition that this catalog—not even really a catalog but more like a lossy but responsible description of the mean properties of the imaging—could be used to transmit to end users far more information than is transferred by traditional astronomical catalogs. We were on a roller coaster of good news, bad news until we cracked it in a nasty cafe across the street from the Grenada bus station.