In the Astronomical Data Group Meeting at Flatiron, Rodrigo Luger (Flatiron) showed his work (in collaboration with a few others) that is heading towards using the earth-shine scattered light in the NASA TESS focal plane to reconstruct the continents and cloud cover on the rotating Earth. This project is something of a joke, but it puts to the test some ideas that are important for the future of mapping the surfaces of directly imaged exoplanets. We discussed the approximations that Luger and team are making for tractability of the inference. My position is that they should make brutal approximations and go easy on themselves mathematically!
In that same meeting, Kate Storey-Fisher (NYU) showed that she can, with her new method for estimating the correlation function, reproduce the SDSS LRG measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Feature, where it was first discovered (by me, among many others)! Her code works and now to show that we can make the measurement with far less effective model complexity and far less dependence on simulations to get uncertainty estimates. She has her killer app working and we are now ready to write a paper.
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