self-calibration

I spent the weekend—in transit to Heidelberg and in the garden there—trying to spec out the least complicated possible project demonstrating that hierarchical inference beats averaging for weak-lensing shear-map measurement. Today I was at MPIA, my summer home, where I will be in residence for July and August. I showed off The Thresher to the PanSTARRS team at MPIA, and then spent the afternoon struggling with Python with Rory Holmes. We are very close to resubmitting our self-calibration paper, which shows that some imaging survey strategies are much better than others. Holmes and I also talked about the next projects, which involve more realistic survey strategies for Euclid and BigBOSS and also methods that will permit simultaneous self-calibration of the flatfield, of intra-pixel variations in sensitivity, of the astrometric mapping, and of the point-spread function.