Problem 2 (Physical Sciences). A group of astronomers at Cal Tech are working on
the Digitized Palomar Sky Survey (DPOSS); for a full description see their report (Odewahn,
Djorgovsky, Brunner, and Gal 1998). In essence, they make a survey of celestial
objects (light sources) for which they record nine characteristics (such as magnitude, area,
image moments) in each of three bands: blue, red, and near-infrared. They seek collaboration
with statisticians to analyze their data, and gave us access to a part of their database,
containing 137,256 celestial objects with all 27 variables.