Gemini Aims ‘The Cannon’ at Faster Spectral Analysis!

“The Cannon” Spectral Modeling

Recently, Gemini South hosted a mini-workshop about a new data-driven method for spectral modeling named “The Cannon.” Anna Ho from Caltech led the session with coordination by Gemini Assistant Scientist, Blair Conn and Richard Lane, from Pontificia Universidad Católica (PUC).

The Cannon is fast, requires no physical models, and achieves comparable accuracy to existing survey data analysis pipelines but with spectra of lower signal-to-noise ratios.

During the workshop, astronomers from Argentina and Chile were encouraged to test The Cannonʻs code by running their own data sets.

“A key strength of The Cannon is that it can transfer information from high quality, high signal to noise data to lower quality, low signal to noise data. This opens up an opportunity for bringing qualitatively different surveys onto the same scale, critical in the large-survey era”, explained Anna Ho.

With Blair Conn