A high research day today, for the first time in what feels like months! In group meeting in the finally-gutted NYU CDS studio space, So Hattori told us about some single transits in Kepler and his putative ability to find them. We unleashed some project management on him and now he has a great to-do list. No success in CampHogg goes unpunished! Along the way, he re-discovered a ridiculously odd Kepler target that has three transits from at least two different kinds of planets, neither of which seems periodic. Or maybe it is one planet around a binary host, or maybe worse? That launched some email trail with some Kepler peeps.
Also at group meeting, Dun Wang showed some near-final tests of the hyper-parameter choices in his data-driven model of the Kepler pixels. It is getting down to details, but details matter. We came up with one final possible simplification for his hyper-parameter choices for him to test this week.
In the afternoon, Alex Malz came by to discuss Spring courses and we ended up working through a menu of possible thesis projects. One that I pitched is so sweet: It is just to write down, very carefully, what we would do if we had instead of a redshift catalog a set of low-precision redshift likelihood functions (with SED or spectral nuisance parameters). Could we then get the luminosity function and spatial clustering of galaxies? Of course we could, but we would have to go hierarchical. Is this practical at LSST scale? Not sure yet.
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