2019-12-19

housekeeping data; Milky Way

Last night or this morning (not sure which) Lily Zhao (Yale) made some nice discoveries about the EXPRES instrument: She found that the housekeeping data (various temperature sensors, chilled water load, etc) correlate really well with the instrument calibration state as defined by our hierarchical (principal-component) model. That's interesting, because it opens up the possibility that we could interpolate the non-parametric calibration parameters in the housekeeping space rather than the time space. That would be cool. Indeed, the time is just a component of the housekeeping data!

In the afternoon, Kathryn Johnston (Columbia) hosted a group of people for the L2G2—the local Local Group group—for talks and discussions. There were many good discussions, led by Jason Hunt (Flatiron). Highlights for me included, first, work on detailed abundances with the cannon by Adam Wheeler (Columbia), who did a great job of describing (and re-implementing) the method, and extending it to do better things. Another was a talk on SAGA by Marla Geha, who showed that the Local Group satellites might be group satellites rather than galaxy satellites. This in the sense that they look more like the satellites of a more massive object than satellites of Milky Way or M31 analogs. It was a great day of great discussions.

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