I've had the pleasure to be part of a paper on healpy, led by Andrea Zonca. The main purpose is to give a quick overview on the project, and to have a proper reference for the many projects that use the Python implementation of the HEALPix format. We published this in the Journal of Open … Continue reading New paper on healpy
Workshop on the ‘Milky Way in the Age of Gaia’
I had the immense pleasure of being invited to attend the "Milky Way in the Age of Gaia" workshop in Orsay/Paris in October. The format was a four-week workshop, with only 2-3 talks per day, and lightning talks on Mondays and thunder talks on Fridays. This was a great way to pitch the projects, and … Continue reading Workshop on the ‘Milky Way in the Age of Gaia’
Extragalactic imprints in dust maps
Yi-Kuan Chiang and Brice Ménard recently published their excellent work on 'Extragalactic Imprints in Galactic Dust Maps'. In the galaxy surveys that we conduct to do precision cosmology, we need an accurate correction of source photometry for Galactic dust extinction. Otherwise, we would be unable to measure the true brightness of a source because we … Continue reading Extragalactic imprints in dust maps
COSMO21 in Valencia, Spain
I've had the pleasure of attending the COSMO21 conference in Valencia, Spain, which was preceded by the ADA summer school on astronomy data analysis techniques. The focus of both was on current and future milestones in cosmology and on new methods and tools that we can use to analyze the upcoming, revolutionary data sets. The … Continue reading COSMO21 in Valencia, Spain
Looking more into deep learning and missing power on large scales
Our Dark Sector group at JPL has recently started an initiative to expand our skillsets towards deep learning, eventually coming up with new ideas to tackle the challenges that we'll face in the current and upcoming generation of cosmological surveys. I've thus started to dig into the deep learning book by Francois Chollet, which I … Continue reading Looking more into deep learning and missing power on large scales
Filtering and re-gridding large scale HI data
Tom Kuiper (JPL) presented a project to fully automate radio astronomy in the Deep Space Network (DSN). The main purpose of the DSN is to communicate with all the NASA spacecrafts, but there is plenty of idle time in which the 34m and 70m dishes could be used for radio astronomy. We'll soon have the … Continue reading Filtering and re-gridding large scale HI data
CMB foregrounds in San Diego
We had a CMB foregrounds workshop just last week at UCSD, coming together to develop a plan for the next year until the CMB Probe Mission Study will be submitted. Our main goal will be to demonstrate that we can control the component separation to a degree that allows us to obtain competitive constraints on the … Continue reading CMB foregrounds in San Diego
First look into the scale-dependent bias and non-Gaussianity
This afternoon, I worked on a model implementation of the scale-dependent bias, following the ansatz of De Putter & Doré (2014, their Eq. 1). The goal is to constrain the fNL parameter which quantifies the amplitude of the primordial non-Gaussianity. These primordial density fluctuations are very Gaussian, but a small departure from this Gaussianity or limits on … Continue reading First look into the scale-dependent bias and non-Gaussianity
Python packaging, astropy, and Travis CI
Last week, I started to re-visited quickspeck, a python package by Duncan Hanson that allows to create angular power spectra for cosmic fields under the Limber approximation (see this paper for a nice overview and an extension). In light of the upcoming CMB lensing workshop at Stanford and our ongoing work on the cross correlation between … Continue reading Python packaging, astropy, and Travis CI
Power spectra of Planck CMB lensing maps
I have recently been working on the cross-correlation of CIB intensity and CMB lensing from the Planck data. I've had a few hiccups with the format of the lensing data and thus decided to document this properly in a notebook, just in case others ran into similar issues. The notebook with the calculations and examples … Continue reading Power spectra of Planck CMB lensing maps
Daniel Lenz 