We’re back, and by that I mean the US government is back. For the last 16 days I’ve been locked out of my office at NASA Ames. As a contractor I’ve been allowed to work, indeed I’ve had quite a productive few weeks.

The first week of the shutdown the SETI Institute in Mountain View kindly hosted me and provided free coffee! With all the Kepler science office in the same room we were able to chat about a few projects we were all working on and it looks like a few papers that have been a long time coming are nearly finished (Kepler planet catalog papers).

Last week I took the opportunity to visit New York University as a guest of David Hogg. We have a few projects together that have been left on the backburner. Hopefully we/I will get these going this time. One of the more straight forward ideas we have is to measure limb darkening using transit of multi-planet systems.

Anyway, I’m going to try and use this blog as a bit of a research/work journal. It may not work, let’s see.