2008 April 17
Actually getting some things done. The past couple of days were spent up at Lick, trying to observe an exciting star that may host a planet. The first night was Murphy’s Law run wild: I had a whole raft of unusual problems to work through, and I barely got any useful data. The second night was much better and I hope that the data I got were pretty good.
Today, I read a paper for Planet Formation tomorrow and wrote up the skeleton of my BBS reduction pipeline. I had gotten really wrapped up in flagging but forgot that I could proof-of-concept the pipeline without doing any flagging at all. It was good to get this stuff done, because now I can always process a batch of data, see how it looks, go back and flag some more, see how it improves, and continue iterating that way. Much better than just flagging away until the data look as perfect as possible, even though the difference is basically entirely psychological. Amusingly, what I was doing went straight back to what I kept on saying in 120: get the end-to-end working first, then worry about the details. I should listen to myself more often.