Image Source.

Sorry about this long lapse in new posts. The end of the academic quarter has left me awash in deadlines and scrambling to get everything done.

Nevertheless, we’ve been making progress behind the scenes. The new oklo server has been delivered, configured, and slotted into a rackspace in a dedicated server room. To use the vernacular, it’s hecka fast. Over the next several days, we’ll be transferring the site over to the new machine, and then it’ll be bye-bye bluehost.

HD 80606 is looking more interesting all the time. I’m working on a writeup of what we’ve been learning. It really has the potential to give us an unambiguous value for the radiative time constant appropriate to the atmospheres of hot Jupiters. The next ‘606 day is December 26th, and I’ll be sending out a circular to the transitsearch.org observers to get a definitive confirmation that it doesn’t transit. Here’s the promotional poster (inspired by the SAO Moonwatch program, while simultaneously attempting to achieve a retro cold-war-flying-saucers feel):

Finally, keep fitting the last batch of Systemic Jr. systems. We need to get a full range of good fits for all of the data sets in order to carry out some very interesting analyses…