Fergus and I spent a good chunk of the day together, discussing in great detail the outline for our first paper on high dynamic-range imaging, and then our possible NSF BIGDATA proposal. The former is about our data-driven PSF (speckle) modeling for the P1640 spectroscopic coronograph. The latter is going to be about self-calibration, the point that if you have huge amounts of data, your science data are far more informative about instrument calibration and properties than the output of any separate, prior, or interspersed calibration strategy. It just takes guts to use them. But that's how we calibrated the SDSS imaging after all: Once we adjusted the observing strategy to include lots of redundancy we were able to get better flats and atmospheric transparency information out of the science scans across random stars than we got from any realistic calibration data on standard stars.
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