A good feeling!

Despite some disturbances in the ether I've been making some really awesome progress lately. Pat on my own shoulder ;) I finally feel I am figuring out a way to manage all of our data in a way that makes my life easier. That is so important with a survey like ours. Nothing special, just making it all as uniform as possible in terms of data format and file names and directory structure, as well as consolidating the data into single files whenever possible and finally carrying as much auxiliary information (even a little redundantly) as possible. The book-keeping part is still horrendous but I feel that once it's done I'll never have to deal with it again. Phew! So for several of the fields I've consolidated all data we have into a single spectroscopic catalog (with a few hundred entries) and a single file of spectra. Now I can plot anything I want vs. anything else. Fun time! The nth nearest neighbor script is working. The spectral fitting code is working. I don't have any of my plots right now so instead here is a plot from the CfA redshift survey. Large scale structure, baby! I'll talk more about it tomorrow. For now here is a movie of LSS evolution with cosmic time:


Now back to job applications.