Introduction

The Cannon is a data-driven method for determining stellar parameters and chemical abundances from stellar spectra in the context of large spectroscopic surveys. The method uses no physical stellar models, is very fast, and achieves comparable accuracy to existing survey pipelines using significantly lower SNR spectra; it requires only a set of objects observed in common between the surveys. Because of these strengths, it has been used to bring different stellar surveys onto a consistent physical scale, and even transfer information from one survey to another.

For a more detailed description, see Ness et al. 2015.

Applications

(Current as of 8 Feb. 2018)

• Re-analysis of APOGEE DR10: Ness et al. 2015
• Measuring mass (and inferring age) from spectra: Ness et al. 2016
• Chemical tagging: Hogg et al. 2016
• Tying LAMOST to the APOGEE label scale: Ho et al. 2017a
• Detailed element abundances (using regularization): Casey et al. 2016a
• Analysis of GALAH spectra: Martell et al. 2017
• Re-analysis of RAVE using TGAS and K2: Casey et al. 2016b
• Masses and ages for 230,000 LAMOST giants via carbon and nitrogen abundances: Ho et al. 2017b
• Galactic Doppelganger (chemical similarity): Ness et al. 2017