I spent part of the morning talking to Mykytyn and Patel about the Sloan Atlas. We have awesome two-d image fitting working on Messier-sized galaxies (the hard ones) and everything looks great but we are having trouble interpreting the output! I fixed a monster bug in the code and nothing changed. This isn't atypical: A huge bug can be fundamental and insane but not actually flow down to different results. That makes me fear for the correctness of the results from almost every large scientific project.
Late in the day, Greenberg sent a huge png file showing the GALEX photon list for a single stellar source. Variations of the photon arrival positions with time, synchronized with spacecraft movements, suggest that we will be able to make a better model of spacecraft attitude and calibration. I am pretty stoked about that. I have done a lot of calibration in my life, but never of a remote spacecraft.
The worst is when you have correct results, fix a bug, break things, and not recover the correct results until you fix two separate bugs that canceled out the original bug.
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