Jun 15th, 2010| 02:38 pm | Posted by vlk
This question came to the CfA Public Affairs office, and I am sharing it with y’all because I think the solution is instructive.
A student had to figure out the name of a stellar object as part of an assignment. He was given the following information about it:
- apparent [V] magnitude = 5.76
- B-V = 0.02
- E(B-V) = 0.00
- parallax = 0.0478 arcsec
- radial velocity = -18 km/s
- redshift = 0 km/s
He looked in all the stellar databases but was unable to locate it, so he asked the CfA for help.
Just to help you out, here are a couple of places where you can find comprehensive online catalogs:
See if you can find it!
Continue reading ‘An Instructive Challenge’ »
Feb 28th, 2008| 10:46 pm | Posted by vlk
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’ »
Tags:
Banff,
Challenge,
dark matter,
Douglas Applegate,
gravitational lensing,
GREAT08,
image analysis,
inference,
lensing,
LSST,
shear,
STEP Category:
Algorithms,
Astro,
Data Processing,
Galaxies,
Imaging,
News,
Optical |
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