What is a Spectrum?
  This contribution describes the "spectro-perfectionism" algorithm of Bolton & Schlegel (2010, PASP, 122, 248) that is being implemented within the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), in terms of its potential to deliver Poisson-limited sky subtraction and lossless compression of the input spectrum likelihood functional given raw CCD data. 
Adam S. Bolton (1), Stephen Bailey (2), Joel Brownstein (1), Parul   Pandey (1), David Schlegel (2), Yiping Shu (1) ((1) Dep...
astro-ph.IM astro-ph.CO