Schiminovich and I met at one of our undisclosed locations (hint: good coffee) to work on GALEX calibration using SDSS stars. I got Foreman-Mackey to help with some web programming: We need to query the SDSS-III CAS from within the program if things are going to be efficient. That now works!
After this we went to the Columbia Astronomy Library to watch Maureen Teyssier (Columbia) speak about comparisons between the Milky Way and its environment and comparable locations in numerical simulations. She finds that she can tentatively identify a few galaxies that are near (but not in) the Local Group that probably, in their past, punched through the dark-matter halo of the Milky Way! Her findings resolve a puzzle in the study of dwarf galaxies: Most isolated dwarf galaxies—galaxies that are outside the virial radius of any luminous galaxy—have abundant cold gas. There are a few exceptions near the MW, and many of these end up in the Teyssier analysis to be punch-through galaxies. That is great and opens up some ideas about measuring the local dynamics on scales larger than the virial radius. This is all related somehow to Geha results I have mentioned previously.
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