radical self-calibration

At group meeting, Fadely showed us plots that show that he can do what I call “radical” self-calibration with realistic (simulated) data from fields of stars. This is the kind of calibration where we figure out the flat-field and PSF simultaneously by insisting that the images we have could have been generated by point sources convolved with some pixel-convolved PSF. He also showed how the results degrade as our knowledge of the PSF gets wrong. We can withstand percent-ish problems with our PSF model, but we can't withstand tens-of-percent. That's interesting, and useful. I feel like we are pretty safe for our HST WFC3 calibration project though: We know the PSF very well and have a great first guess at the flat too.

At the same meeting, we bitched about the Astronomers' Telegram, looked at an outburst from a black-hole source, argued about mapping the sky with Fermi GBM, and looked at K2 data on a Sanchis-Ojeida planet. Oh and right after group meeting, Malz demonstrated to me conclusively that our Bayesian hierarchical inference of the redshift distribution—given probabilistic photometric redshifts—will work!