dotastronomy, day 1

Today was the first day of dotastronomy, hosted by the Adler Planetarium. There were talks by Arfon Smith (Github), Erin Braswell (Open Science), Dustin Lang (Astrometry), and Alberto Pepe (Authorea). Smith made a lot of parallels between the open collaborations built around github and scientific collaborations. I think this analogy might be deep. In the afternoon, unconference was characteristically diverse and interesting. Highlights for me included a session on making scientific articles readable on many platforms, and the attendant implications for libraries, journals, and the future of publishing. Also, there was a session on the putative future Open Source Sky Survey, for which Lang and I own a domain, and for which Astrometry.net is a fundamental technology (and possibly Enhance!). There were many good ideas for defining the mission and building the communities for this project.

At coffee break, Foreman-Mackey and I looked at McFee's project of using Kepler light-curves as basis vectors for synthesizing arbitrary music recordings. Late at night, tomorrow's hack day started early, with informal pitches and exploratory work at the bar. More on all this tomorrow!

Delaware

I spent the day in Delaware, hanging out with John Gizis (Delaware) and talking about finding rare objects. He has found some of the coolest and nearest stars in the WISE data, by very straightforward methods. I think he published the first WISE paper after the WISE public data release; this reminds me of 1996 and the Hubble Deep Field! He has also found hotter stars with strange infrared properties. One of the many things we discussed is understanding the spatial distribution of stars with dust disks relative to the population of very young stars in the local neighborhood. I also gave a seminar.

GSOC meet-up, day 3

Today we got OpenID working on Astrometry.net's nascent beta-test web site. This means that users can log in using one of their existing logins from some existing site they trust; we don't have to maintain our own user records or authentication system. I love web 2.0!

For days 4 and 5, team (Chen and Lalimarmo) will be in Princeton, working with Dustin Lang. Good luck team!

how to frame a comet

Lang and I added parameters to our Comet Holmes model that capture the statistics of where an astrophotographer locates her or his subject within the frame. These seemed to improve our model likelihood, confirming intuitions from Iain Murray. Oddly we are learning a lot more in this project about astrophotographers than we are about comets! We also figured out by detective work that this image (below), which was torquing some of our fits, is not an image of Comet Holmes, but rather a faint galaxy!

fitting orbits to astrophotographers' behavior

In our clandestine activities of the weekend, we wrote down a generative model for how amateur astrophotographers point their telescopes. Here (above) are some parameters of that model, superimposed on a sky picture of the footprints of their images.

fiducial field

Brett Mensch (old friend of Sam's) and I discussed the possibility of blessing a good field for an amateur campaign, aimed at demonstrating the power of the crowd for astronomical discovery (and not just monitoring and the like). He had many good ideas for what would appeal to amateurs and what would make the project easier.

[I have noticed that this diary has devolved from "Hogg's research" to "Hogg's conversations about his research"]

evidence for sources

Stumm, Lang, and I gathered some (heuristic) evidence for sources in the region of M42 (the Orion Nebula) using images submitted to the Flickr pool. The image below shows in transparent blue symbols the detected sources in the Flickr images in a tiny patch in the nebula. We take it from this that the amateur data do have highly redundant (and therefore reliable) information about many sources.

AAVSO

Spent the afternoon at the AAVSO annual meeting in Nantucket (yes, my travel schedule is not sane). My word are the AAVSO observers impressive! Every talk showed ridiculous light curves with incredible sampling and huge signal-to-noise, and many of the photometry sources are people working visually (with their eyes, no detectors). The data are consistent from observer to observer and highly scientifically productive. Of course, many of the AAVSO members use CCDs too, and these tend to be among the best calibrated and understood among hobbyist setups. Naturally, that is why I am here.

open-source sky survey

I spent the day at the University of Washington, where, among other things, I pitched Stumm and my idea of the open-source sky survey. There is a lot to be done, but if we can do it, the OSSS could operate itself, in principle. I also spent time with Dalcanton and Ivezic talking about astrometry, and Connolly about galaxy evolution.