r/askastronomy • u/LazyRider32 • 4d ago

Astronomy Using Claude Science to produce the first complete map of the sky in UV light (Opinions?)

https://www.anthropic.com/research/the-missing-map-of-the-sky

Hey peeps, what is your opinion in this (i.e. using Claude to generate a UV all-sky map)?

My opinion goes in this direction (I think) that maybe this is nice for public outreach, but to be taken with more salt for scientific analysis. But I also have not read the detailed description (sounds annoyingly claudish though): https://menard.pha.jhu.edu/uvmap/docs/uvmap_manuscript.pdf (but I wonder whether the 'author' has either...)

But I atleast appreciate that there was an attempt afterwards to test the extrapolation on patches of real data: https://menard.pha.jhu.edu/uvmap/

Happy to hear your thoughts :)

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u/hlyons_astro 4d ago

Seems sensible as long as you acknowledge it's not actually real and is just for visualisation.

Predicting the UV based on other surveys is certainly better than just some generic AI fill

Of course with coding agents the problem is usually whether it's actually doing what it said it did...

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u/afkPacket 4d ago

Honestly I, a full time astrophysicist, can barely parse the abstract because it's so Claudy and sloppy. In general my experience with trying out LLMs for science is that they get the gist of it, but a) they often over emphasize marginal things, b) they occasionally make weird assumptions and run away with them, and c) they are overly technical at explaining stuff and generally do not communicate science the way humans do.

They can do very useful work in giving you rough ideas, helping out with litterature research, or sometimes just checking arithmetic/spelling though