The highlight of my day was a pair-coding session with Bedell (Flatiron) in which we worked through issues with our code wobble that measures radial velocities in extremely high-resolution multi-epoch spectroscopy. The model includes star and telluric models, and regularizations that constrain unconstrained freedoms. The issues are all related to these regularizations: How to set their values, and why various optimization strategies aren't working. We found a few bugs, made a lot of plots, and experimented. In the end: It looks like it is all working! I am so stoked. This could end up being the key project of the Astronomical Data Group at Flatiron. This working session also strongly endorsed (for me, once again) the value of pair coding.
At lunch time I gave the CCPP Brown-Bag talk about the GD-1 projects I am doing with Bonaca (Harvard) and others. It was fun. Several questions from the audience were about what we can understand about the population of perturbers, from this one perturber. That's a good question, to which I have no (current) answer)
Late in the day, I talked to Ben Pope (NYU) about projects in astronomical time-series imaging. He has nice results that show that independent components analysis might be very valuable; this is something that my former student Dun Wang was interested in. And we also discussed things that relate to speckle imaging, lucky imaging, and interferometry. Can we reconstruct good images from many bad ones? And should we? We resolved to do some experiments with the simulated TESS data.
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