How Not to Do a Survey

Here is the biggest problem with my life these days, personal problems aside. I am working on a spectroscopic survey - ~20,000 galaxies, taken over 4 years with 4 different instruments and during 15 observing runs. Wow. We have observed 28 different fields, half of them were observed with more than one instrument and/or during more than one observing run. Putting all these data together in one pile is a challenge because of all sorts of systematic effects that array of observations may have. But we did next to nothing to take care of that problem during our actual observations and now that we are trying to figure out what the errors are drawing straws. We are banking on two methods - one is measuring the velocities (i.e. offset from zero) of the sky lines (which I have already talked about), and the second is matching redshifts of objects observed twice. The second is the one causing my sleepless nights these days, the biggest problem being that the number of objects observed more than once is miniscule and that the very reason we observed them twice is because we didn't get them the first time. Errors turn out to be big, bigger than my advisor likes and I feel like crying.

My computer got upgraded today, a happy news except for the fact that the OS got upgraded too and now nothing seems to works quite as I would like it. Aghhhrrrrr!

Every other Tuesday our department holds Galaxy Group meetings for people working in extragalactic astronomy. The format is the usual "Bring-your-lunch-and-listen-to-two-speakers" thing. One of the talks today was particularly striking - what to do with a Spitzer warm mission when all that's left will be the IRAC 3.6 and 4.5 um chanels. It was ... wow!

More later... getting too sleepy...