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!

Open-Source Sky Survey

I haven't thought about the Open-Source Sky Survey in a long time, but my NIPS submission with Lang and Schölkopf made me think about it again. We can combine all the images of the night sky ever taken into an all-sky map with an algorithm that is robust to calibration and transformation problems and that is linear in the total data size. That's awesome! Now I just hope we maintain momentum after the (unhealthy, insane) NIPS deadline.

[ps. This post violates the anonymity requirements of NIPS. That just shows that submitting to NIPS is not consistent with my ideals of open science.]

mini-LSST

At lunch Kilian Walsh (NYU), Foreman-Mackey, and I discussed construction of a mini-LSST pipeline that would work on all the data ever submitted to Astrometry.net. To start, we are going to try to extract information from a small set of images overlapping a small patch of sky. But the long-term plan is to get Astrometry.net to be basing its work not on the USNO-B1.0 catalog but rather it's own catalog built from its own submitted data. Each incoming image will be calibrated with the current best information, and then used to adjust that information (based on discrepancies). And, of course, we want the system to make novel discoveries along the way.

innovative computing

I spent the day at Harvard between the CfA and the Institute for Innovative Computing, where I gave my automated astrometry and open-source sky survey talk. I also spent some time chatting with Willman about our projects with Zolotov, and with the IIC staff about computation in science.

Vandy

Spent a very enjoyable Thursday and Friday at Vanderbilt. I gave my "Steve Jobs" talk on Astrometry.net and the possibility it creates for a future "Open-Source Sky Survey". For what it is worth, my slides are here (PDF).

amateur observations

My research today—shepherding along the huge GALEX–SDSS match—was so boring that I can't describe it here. Given the usual standards I maintain at this blog, that's saying something! What I can say is that at journal club I learned about a very tantalizing Solar-System-like exoplanetary system discovered in part with observations by amateur astronomers. That's a great application for the Open-Source Sky Survey! (A challenge: try to guess our URL.)