Abstract
We develop an automated technique to measure quasar redshifts in the Baryon
Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
Our technique is an extension of an earlier Gaussian process method for
detecting damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (DLAs) in quasar spectra with known
redshifts. We show that we are competitive to existing quasar redshift
estimators. Importantly our method produces a probabilistic density function
for the quasar redshift, allowing quasar redshift uncertainty to be propagated
to downstream users. We apply this method to detecting DLAs, accounting in a
Bayesian fashion for redshift uncertainty. Compared to our earlier method with
a known quasar redshift, we have only a moderate decrease in our ability to
detect DLAs, predominantly in the noisiest spectra. Our code is publicly
available.
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