2014-09-15

AstroData Hack Week, day 1

On my way to Seattle, I wrote up a two-page document about inferring the velocity distribution when you only get (perhaps noisy, perhaps censored) measurements of v sin i. When I arrived at the AstroData Hack Week, I learned that Foreman-Mackey and Price-Whelan had both come to the same conclusion that this would be a valuable and achievable hack for the week. Price-Whelan and I spent hacking time specifying the project better.

That said, Foreman-Mackey got excited about doing a good job on K2 point-source photometry. We talked out the components of such a model and tried to find the simplest possible version of the project, which Foreman-Mackey wants to approach by building a full, parameterized, physical model of the point-spread function, the spacecraft Euler angles, and the flat-field. Late in the day (at the bar) we found out that our first shot at this model is going badly off the rails: The flat-field and the point-spread function are degenerate (somewhat or totally?) in the naive model we have right now. Simple fixes didn't work.

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