finishing a paper

Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) and I have nearly finished our paper on multiplying Gaussians together. I spent part of the weekend re-reading, adjusting, tweaking, and reformatting it. I also discussed it a bit with Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA), who thinks maybe we should attach our result more clearly to what the reader already knows.

editing and commenting

All I did today was comment on and edit reports by Wang, Malz, Vakili, the AAAC, and the Spitzer Oversight Committee.

GALEX photometry

Schiminovich and I worked (in our usual style) on the photometry of SDSS sources overlapping GALEX imaging. We planned the first scientific vetting steps for the catalog. I also spent a bit of time at the end of the day writing a polemical introduction to the paper (will need editing).

fitting a line, associating stars

I spent a long time on the phone with Lang today discussing various matters but in particular our objective function for matching stars between an image and a catalog. This objective function is necessary to write down in advance of us declaring success (or anything else) in our plan to nail tweak next week. (Tweak is the part of Astrometry.net that measures detailed focal-plane distortions.)

I also dusted off our document about fitting a straight line to data. Part of my reminiscing about Roweis has brought me back to this subject and I promised myself I would finish that up. It could be a useful document and I learned that it is very close. I started to mark up what we have.