Archive for the ‘Optical’ Category.

[AAS-HEAD 2011] Time Series in High Energy Astrophysics

We organized a Special Session on Time Series in High Energy Astrophysics: Techniques Applicable to Multi-Dimensional Analysis on Sep 7, 2011, at the AAS-HEAD conference at Newport, RI. The talks presented at the session are archived at http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/#head2011

A tremendous amount of information is contained within the temporal variations of various measurable quantities, such as the energy distributions of the incident photons, the overall intensity of the source, and the spatial coherence of the variations. While the detection and interpretation of periodic variations is well studied, the same cannot be said for non-periodic behavior in a multi-dimensional domain. Methods to deal with such problems are still primitive, and any attempts at sophisticated analyses are carried out on a case-by-case basis. Some of the issues we seek to focus on are methods to deal with are:
* Stochastic variability
* Chaotic Quasi-periodic variability
* Irregular data gaps/unevenly sampled data
* Multi-dimensional analysis
* Transient classification

Our goal is to present some basic questions that require sophisticated temporal analysis in order for progress to be made. We plan to bring together astronomers and statisticians who are working in many different subfields so that an exchange of ideas can occur to motivate the development of sophisticated and generally applicable algorithms to astronomical time series data. We will review the problems and issues with current methodology from an algorithmic and statistical perspective and then look for improvements or for new methods and techniques.

mini-Workshop on Computational AstroStatistics [announcement]

mini-Workshop on Computational Astro-statistics: Challenges and Methods for Massive Astronomical Data
Aug 24-25, 2010
Phillips Auditorium, CfA,
60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138

URL: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/CAS2010
Continue reading ‘mini-Workshop on Computational AstroStatistics [announcement]’ »

SDO launched

The Solar Dynamics Observatory, which promises a flood of data on the Sun, was launched today from Cape Kennedy.

Killer App

The iPhone is an amazing device. I have heard that some people use it as a phone, too, but it really is an extraordinary portable computer. It is faster and more powerful than the Sparcstations I used as a grad student, and will fit into your pocket. And most importantly, you can fit an entire planetarium on it.

There are many good planetarium programs that you can access on laptops, but it is really not that much fun to lug them around on camping trips or even out on to the roof at night. But now, thanks to the iPhone (and the iPod Touch) there has been a great leap forward. Continue reading ‘Killer App’ »

Go Maroons!

UChicago, my alma mater, is doing alright for itself in the spacecraft naming business.

First there was Edwin Hubble (S.B. 1910, Ph.D. 1917).
Then came Arthur Compton (the “MetLab”).
Followed by Subramanya Chandrasekhar (Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics).

And now, Enrico Fermi.

Magnitude [Eqn]

I still remember my first class as a new grad student. As a cocky Physics graduate, I was quite sure I knew plenty of astronomy. Astro 301, class 1, and it took all of 20 minutes of talk about stellar magnitudes to put that notion to permanent rest. So, for the sake of our stats colleagues, here’s a brief primer on one of the basic building blocks of astronomy. Continue reading ‘Magnitude [Eqn]’ »

Did they, or didn’t they?

Earlier this year, Peter Edmonds showed me a press release that the Chandra folks were, at the time, considering putting out describing the possible identification of a Type Ia Supernova progenitor. What appeared to be an accreting white dwarf binary system could be discerned in 4-year old observations, coincident with the location of a supernova that went off in November 2007 (SN2007on). An amazing discovery, but there is a hitch.

And it is a statistical hitch, and involves two otherwise highly reliable and oft used methods giving contradictory answers at nearly the same significance level! Does this mean that the chances are actually 50-50? Really, we need a bona fide statistician to take a look and point out the errors of our ways.. Continue reading ‘Did they, or didn’t they?’ »

The GREAT08 Challenge

Grand statistical challenges seem to be all the rage nowadays. Following on the heels of the Banff Challenge (which dealt with figuring out how to set the bounds for the signal intensity that would result from the Higgs boson) comes the GREAT08 Challenge (arxiv/0802.1214) to deal with one of the major issues in observational Cosmology, the effect of dark matter. As Douglas Applegate puts it: Continue reading ‘The GREAT08 Challenge’ »

Spurious Sources

[arXiv:0709.2358] Cleaning the USNO-B Catalog through automatic detection of optical artifacts, by Barron et al.

Statistically speaking, “false sources” are generally in the domain of Type II Type I errors, defined by the probability of detecting a signal where there is none. But what if there is a clear signal, but it is not real? Continue reading ‘Spurious Sources’ »

[ArXiv] SDSS DR6, July 23, 2007

From arxiv/astro-ph:0707.3413
The Sixth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey by … many people …

The sixth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS DR6) is available at http://www.sdss.org/dr6. Additionally, Catalog Archive Service (CAS) and
SQL interface to access the catalog would be useful to data searching statisticians. Simple SQL commends, which are well documented, could narrow down the size of data and the spatial coverage.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] SDSS DR6, July 23, 2007’ »