2019-01-11

what's permitted for target selection?

Because I have been working with Rix (MPIA) to help the new project SDSS-V make plans to choose spectroscopic targets, and also because of work I have been doing with Bedell (Flatiron) on thinking about planning radial-velocity follow-up observations, I find myself saying certain things over and over again about how we are permitted to choose targets if we want it to be easy (and even more importantly, possible) to use the data in a statistical project that, say, determines the population of stars or planets, or, say, measures the structural properties of the Milky Way disk. Whenever I am saying things over and over again, and I don't have a paper to point to, that suggests we write one. So I started conceiving today a paper about selection functions in general, and what you gain and lose by making them more complicated in various ways. And what is not allowed, ever!

No comments:

Post a Comment