Milkyway: Separation Status and New Runs

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The separation runs that analyse the northern galactic cap (Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS Stripes 9-27) have nearly finished - soon we'll be able to wrap all of that data together, and with data from Nathan Cole's PhD thesis, we'll have a nice scientific paper out in the next few months. We'll keep you notified.That doesn't mean that the separation code will be retired - far from it. We're starting new separation runs (the ones with "mix" in the name) that are testing the robustness of the separation code. We'll be running simulated data sets along side real data to test several aspects of the stream-fitting process. The main questions are: What would Milkyway@home do if something different from our model exists in the data? And how different would that something have to be in order to modify our results?Also, the release of SDSS Data Release 8 earlier this year gives us access to several stripes of data in the southern galactic cap. We are currently processing this data (It's not as continuous as the northern data, so we have to cut out areas with spotty data), and it will eventually run on Milkway@home.We are also looking to improve the code on Milkyway@home. My brand new paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.2057) studies the distribution function of stars in the Milky Way halo, and provides a new convolution kernel that should make Milkyway@home more effective. There are a few other results from that paper, and inside work, that we would like to implement in the Milkyway@home searches. When we update these functions, we will run stripes over again and look for differences.Long story short: We're almost done with one part of Milkyway@home's mission, but there's still plenty to do. Happy Crunching!Cheers - Matthew N

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