Information and statistics on the first data release:
I'm interested in the real meat - what is the distance to the Pleiades star cluster? Were the Hipparcos parallax measurements indeed wrong?
Looks like a nice data set. I was hoping they'd show a color-magnitude diagram or two, but the Cepheid & RR Lyrae P-L plots were nice. I bet there's quite a race on right now by different groups to get the first papers on arXiv.
Is there any place where the figures are presented in an easy to view format (distance in light years, star type etc.)?
Quote from: Galactic Penguin SST on 09/15/2016 01:37 amIs there any place where the figures are presented in an easy to view format (distance in light years, star type etc.)?You'll be lucky! Although ESA is playing lip-service to the idea of public engagement and for members of the public to search the database to find items of interest, they don't appear to have actually done anything to facilitate same.There is a search page, the use of which is presumably self-evident to professional astronomers etc, but which is far from clear to me, and possibly most laymen. There's no how-to-use guide available, for instance. Or at least I couldn't find one! Given BBC news showed some schoolchildren who found a supernova, it's presumably not that difficult to use once you know how. Was there some material given to teachers by ESA, or did this school just happen to have contact with somehow who's familiar with such database search engines? A local university outreach perhaps?This follows the frankly dire media presentation. ESA is notoriously poor at public outreach compared to NASA; this could be down to budgets, but I suspect it's because the individuals involved don't care that much.
Quote from: CuddlyRocket on 09/15/2016 04:30 amQuote from: Galactic Penguin SST on 09/15/2016 01:37 amIs there any place where the figures are presented in an easy to view format (distance in light years, star type etc.)?You'll be lucky! Although ESA is playing lip-service to the idea of public engagement and for members of the public to search the database to find items of interest, they don't appear to have actually done anything to facilitate same.There is a search page, the use of which is presumably self-evident to professional astronomers etc, but which is far from clear to me, and possibly most laymen. There's no how-to-use guide available, for instance. Or at least I couldn't find one! Given BBC news showed some schoolchildren who found a supernova, it's presumably not that difficult to use once you know how. Was there some material given to teachers by ESA, or did this school just happen to have contact with somehow who's familiar with such database search engines? A local university outreach perhaps?This follows the frankly dire media presentation. ESA is notoriously poor at public outreach compared to NASA; this could be down to budgets, but I suspect it's because the individuals involved don't care that much.You can use the search feature using identifiers from the Kepler Input Catalog. I suspect it also works with the Hipparcos catalog. You should find a column listing the parallax in milliarc seconds. You have to convert that to parsec or light years. I tried it for KIC 8462852, but couldn't get my conversion to match what was on reddit. It's definately not friendly. Par for the course when dealing with ESA.
You can use the search feature using identifiers from the Kepler Input Catalog. I suspect it also works with the Hipparcos catalog. You should find a column listing the parallax in milliarc seconds. You have to convert that to parsec or light years. I tried it for KIC 8462852, but couldn't get my conversion to match what was on reddit. It's definately not friendly. Par for the course when dealing with ESA.
Are systematic errors those errors introduced into the results by Gaia itself?
The typical uncertainty for the parallaxes is 0.3 mas, where it should be noted that a systematic component of 0.3 mas should be added (see Sect. 6).