Terra Hunting Science Meeting, day 1

Today was the first day of the Terra Hunting science meeting. We made great progress on target selection, which was our primary goal. We decided that we should only consider stars that have sufficient visibility from the observatory and sufficient brightness to deliver sufficient photons to provide precisely enough measured radial-velocity variations over a decade to meet our planet-detection goals. That is, we should make the parent sample of our final selection to be stars where we at least have enough photons to detect an Earth. That is an obvious and simple point, but this was the first meeting where we really clearly identified it, and started to figure out how that flows down to a target list. It turns out that there aren't huge numbers of stars that even meet this strict requirement. And of course we spent lots of time talking about all the reasons that we won't get photon-limited radial-velocities, so our final target list must be much more restricted, probably.