PanSTARRS and the Tractor

In a final full-day sprint—and it was full day—Marshall and I got the Tractor running on a set of PanSTARRS cutouts. I am pretty stoked; it is the first third party full implementation of the Tractor and everything pretty-much worked out of the box. It wasn't trivial though. One of the big issues with the Tractor is that (fundamentally) it is an optimization code, and astronomers (even great ones like Lang) shouldn't be writing optimization codes; there are experts who do that. We probably should ingest Ceres. But as Lang points out, there aren't many options for optimization that capitalize on sparsity. In the background, Foreman-Mackey worked on running our post-Lucky stuff on the same PanSTARRS data, so we have a full suite of potential PanSTARRS tools coming along.