Today was the first day of the CanSAS meeting (the eighth) held in Tokai this time. Apart from meeting amazing people, I also got the chance to present about the modular data corrections approach (so far no negative opinions), listen to some amazing lectures on data corrections and discuss about corrections as well. In particular, the correction discussion was a mix between X-ray scattering and neutron scattering discussions, although the neutron people did dominate the discussion. This was likely proportional to the relative magnitude of their problems.
The discussion also brought forth quite a few tall tales of times past, with stories of design ideas that turned out to be bad ideas. The plan is to put some of these stories online at some point, so that budding instrumentalists can avoid those particular design foibles. A full summary of the remaining discussion items will follow at a later stage.
There were some interesting lectures by Paul Butler on the SAS Portal and Andrew Nelson on reflectometry calibrations. Richard Heenan talked about time-of-flight neutron scattering data corrections (with good insight in transmission measurements), showing impressive agreement in his datasets (though it should be said that they did remove datapoints they didn’t like). Before this, Toshiya Otomo talked about the basic set-up for time-of-flight data corrections at JPARC.
Rob Rambo demonstrated impressive skills in programming and background subtraction (to get his protein scattering properly corrected and analysed). Adrian Rennie Talked a little (long) about intercalibration of instruments, and the results from the round-robin measurements that were performed for that (in preparation for tomorrow, where a discussion on future calibrations will take place). All these were headed by an introduction by Jun-ichi Suzuki and Mitsuhiro Shibayama.
Besides these talks, there was plenty of time for invaluable discussions during coffee breaks and lunch with a variety of people.
It’s all a bit busy during this meeting, and tomorrow is no different with another bout of excellent talks and discussions. Hopefully I will have some time to post images then!
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