half-pixel issues; building our own Gibbs sampler

First thing in the morning I met with Steven Mohammed (Columbia) and Dun Wang (NYU) to discuss GALEX calibration and imaging projects. Wang has a very clever astrometric calibration of the satellite, built by cross-correlating photons with the positions of known stars. This astrometric calibration depends on properties of the photons for complicated reasons that relate to the detector technology on board the spacecraft. Mohammed finds, in an end-to-end test of Wang's images, that there might be half-pixel issues in our calibration. We came up with methods for tracking that down.

Late in the day, I met with Ruth Angus (Columbia) to discuss the engineering in her project to combine all age information (and self-calibrate all methods). We discussed how to make a baby test where we can do the sampling with technology we are good at, before we write a brand-new Gibbs sampler from scratch. Why, you might ask, would any normal person write a Gibbs sampler from scratch when there are so many good packages out there? Because you always learn a lot by doing it! If our home-built Gibbs doesn't work well, we will adopt a package.