Posts tagged ‘data’

An Instructive Challenge

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’ »

Datums

For someone who doesn’t know any grammar, I can be a bit of a Grammar nazi sometimes. And one of my pet peeves is when people use the word data in the singular. No! Data are!

Or so I used to believe. Continue reading ‘Datums’ »

model vs model

As Alanna pointed out, astronomers and statisticians mean different things when they say “model”. To complicate matters, we have also started to use another term called “data model”. Continue reading ‘model vs model’ »