2017-05-27

measuring the velocity of a star

Yesterday and today I wrote code. This is a much rarer activity than I would like! I wrote code to test different methods for measuring the centroid of an absorption line in a stellar spectrum, with applications to extreme precision radial-velocity experiments. After some crazy starts and stops, I was able to strongly confirm my strong expectation: Cross-correlation with a realistic template is far better for measuring radial velocities than cross-correlation with a bad template (especially a binary mask). I am working out the full complement of experiments I want to do. I am convinced that there is a (very boring) paper to be written.

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