Today Doug Finkbeiner (Harvard), Josh Speagle (Harvard), and Ana Bonaca (Harvard) came to visit me in my undisclosed location in Heidelberg. We discussed many different things, including Finkbeiner's recent work on finding outliers and calibration issues in the LAMOST spectral data using a data-driven model, and Speagle's catalog of millions of stellar properties and distances in PanSTARRS+Gaia+2MASS+WISE.
Bonaca and I took that latter catalog and looked at new ways to visualize it. We both have the intuition that good visualization could and will pay off in these large surveys. Both in terms of finding structures and features, and giving us intuition about how to build automated systems that will then look for structures and features. And besides, excellent visualizations are productive in other senses too, like for use in talks and presentations. I spent much of my day coloring stars by location in phase space or the local density in phase space, or both. And playing with the color maps!
There's a big visualization literature for these kinds of problems. Next step is to try to dig into that.
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