I had fun today talking to Neige Frankel (CITA) about all things Snail-y. We discussed how to verify the stellar parameters we are using for our Snail studies. One issue is that we want to check that things are (fairly) well mixed along orbits, but we need a theory of the orbits to check this. I recommended that, instead of computed actions (integrals of motion), we use statistics of the abundance distribution. After all, if the stars are well mixed, moments of the abundance distribution ought to be constant on orbits. If you just need the actions to label the orbits, abundance moments serve as replacements. Actions are theoretical and unobservable. Abundance moments are observable and measurable (noisily maybe!).
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