Monthly Archives: December 2019


Astro Machine Learning

The astroML project was started in 2012 to accompany the book Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy, by Željko Ivezić, Andrew Connolly, Jacob Vanderplas, and Alex Gray.  The astroML Python package is publicly available and designed as a…

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KBMOD: Kernel Based Moving Object Detection

Searching for faint Solar System objects Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) are a population of Solar System objects that exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. Finding these objects is important because understanding their true distribution teaches us about the formation history…

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ADAM: Asteroid Decision Analysis and Mapping

The increased number of asteroid discoveries over the past few decades as well as the expectation that the number of known asteroids will increase by five times when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST; https://www.lsst.org/) is expected to come online…

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THOR: Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery

Key Points: Discovering Solar System small bodies (asteroids and comets) is not easy Currently deployed algorithms impose a strict constraint on how telescopes operate and what datasets can be used to discover these objects Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) is…

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Letter From the Director

Welcome to the DiRAC Institute newsletter. As we head towards the winter solstice, if you were lucky with the clouds and the near full moon, you may have seen the Geminid meteor shower which peaked early in the morning of…

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Meet DiRAC’s Research Team: Dr. Kyle Boone

Understanding why the expansion of the universe is getting faster with time is one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology today. Kyle Boone, a fellow at the DiRAC Institute, focuses his research on developing novel statistical methods for astronomy and…

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DiRAC Researchers Present at the AAS Meeting 2020

Searching for Boyajian’s Star Analogs with the Zwicky Transient Facility The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey is a treasure trove for time domain science, and members of DiRAC’s Time Domain & Inference group are collaborating to comb through some 200…

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LSST Data in the Clouds

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an upcoming sky survey that aims to conduct a 10 year long survey from which we hope to answer questions about dark matter, dark energy, hazardous asteroids and the formation and structure of…

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Spearheading Precision White Dwarf Seismology with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

DiRAC Fellow Keaton Bell is coordinating an international collaboration of asteroseismologists to study the brightness variations of pulsating white dwarf stars recorded by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is capable of much more than its name…

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DiRAC’s Machine Learning Book gets a 2nd Edition

DiRAC faculty Zeljko Ivezic, together with DiRAC Institute Director Andy Connolly and collaborators Jacob Vanderplas and Alex Gray, have just published an updated edition of their book “Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy: A Practical Python Guide for the Analysis…

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