galaxy and star images, job ad

I met with Ekta Patel to discuss progress on sample selection and context information for the Sloan Atlas of Galaxies. I am past due on various deadlines on that project! I met with Kilian Walsh (NYU) who is going to do some trial projects this summer with me, relating to Astrometry.net and automated astrophysics data analysis in input data. Our hope is to facilitate making discoveries in data input to the system on the Web. Schiminovich came down for a few hours and found that WISE photometry does a good job of ruling out the possibility that any of our GALEX-discovered white-dwarf transits is caused by a planet (rather than a low-mass star). The jury is still out, I hope, but we also have much more to discover. Foreman-Mackey and I ran on the challenge that Federica Bianco gave us, but we didn't find the elusive third star that we are supposed to find. But then I started to get suspicious that it even exists.

In related news, a group that includes Rob Fergus and me has funding to hire a postdoc. The successful applicant will have experience in advanced probabilistic inference and also sophisticated astronomical image modeling, calibration, or measurement. If that sounds like you and you are interested in doing more of that kind of stuff, send me email.