John Johnson (Harvard) came to NYU today along with a big fraction of his group: Ben Montet, Ruth Angus, Andrew Vanderburg, Yutong Shan. In addition, Fabienne Bastien (PSU), Ian Czekala (Harvard), Boris Leistedt (UCL), and Tim Morton (Princeton) showed up. We pitched early in the day, in the NYU CDS Studio Space, and then hacked all day. Projects included: Doing the occurrence rate stuff we do for planets but for eclipsing binaries, generalizing the Bastien "flicker" method for getting surface gravities for K2 data, building a focal-plane model for K2 to improve lightcurve extraction, documenting and build-testing code, modeling stellar variability using a mixture of Gaussians in Fourier space, and more! Great progress was made, especially on K2 flicker and focal-plane modeling. I very much hope this is the start of a beautiful relationship between our groups.
I also had long conversations with Leistedt about near-future probabilistic approaches to cosmology using our new technologies, Sanderson about series expansions of potentials for Milky Way modeling, Huppenkothen about AstroHackWeek 2015, and Vakili about star centroiding. In somewhat related news, during the morning pitch session, I couldn't stop myself from describing the relationships I see between structured signals, correlation functions, power spectra, Gaussian processes, cosmology, and stellar asteroseismology. I think we might be able to make asteroseismology more productive with smaller data sets.
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