First meeting in a long time!
Saul is told that the introduction to the meeting he was at was an unattributed quote from Kolb saying that he wanted a complete retraction from the supernova people about the cosmological constant. We had to admit being wrong then to avoid somebody getting hurt.... Sounds vicious. I think I'll keep my aluminum pipe close at hand.
Larry Thompson (or somebody) suggested that we should try to use their 1m at Laguna (?) for the nearby supernova stuff. Apparently he sounded interesting in collaborating. One should follow up on this.
Don and Steve will be going down to Santa Cruz on Friday to lab test the CCDs. They're still on the wafer. They are going to proceed cautiously, to avoid destroying things.
Gerson reports in proxy for Carl about a Kuiper belt object found by HOU people. This is from data from the 23rd of march this year. In that search run, it was moving some 7 BTC pixels per hour. They found it the next night, and then on the data a few nights later.
Don objects that it's not an asteroid (as Gerson says), but a "Kuiper Belt Object." The distance to it is 42 AU (assuming a circular orbit). Greg says we should put it on the list for WIYN to recover. The question arises as to how close we estimate the position.
Peter sent E-mail this morning to Doug at HST to find out what happened with the Albinoni observations we were supposed to get last night. (We dont' know if we got them.) Peter hasn't heard back yet.
Alex is sitll working on lining up HST data. Greg says it will work. What he's doing is finding everything he can on the images. He uses the RA and Dec solution from the header to get RA and Dec, which can be wrong. He then tries to group or get rotations or something... it didn't really make much sense to somebody who hasn't been following what he's been doing.
Mike says the white dwarf search is coming along nicely. He's going through fields and making plots of the motion of objects over timespans of 1-2 years. He's looking for things which have slopes greater than 2 sigma (or some such cut). Mike has less than a month to do this and write it up for his thesis. (After that, though, he will keep working and try to get it published.)
Peter reports. He's been working on the rates of Type II's, for HDF (Phillips and Gillian [sp?]), and for our Keck search. The rates of Type II's are extremely sensitive to your efficiency curves. You tend to find them at nearer redshifts, and they have smaller percent increases. This and faintness makes them harder to find, as well as the fact that II's more likely have extinction than Ia's. In the Phillips HDF search, he guesses one Ia (at z=1.32 (photometric) in elliptical) and one II (z=0.958, spectroscopic), and that matches his rates. Peter says we would have tripled our areal coverage in order to get a type II at maybe a redshift of 0.6. (There are a whole lot of model dependent things that go into this.)
As an aside, Peter thinks that 9571, our zoon, could be a Type II. Some who object that it's too bright. Peter says that a II can be 2-2.5 magnitudes brighter than a Ia. Peter also says that the spectrum can look like a power law spectrum, if it's a II at early epoch (out to about 20 days after the explosion). Peter says that II's have very fast decline in the U-band. (In B, they are slower than Ia's, typically.)
In terms of rates in general (HST, Keck), Saul predicts we will be severely limiting the rates of high-z supernovae, given how few (one) we found. ("We" in this case refers to the Gillian/Phillips group as well as us.)
Greg and Peter have been talking about writing a paper with the Albinoni spectrum and results from rates. Rob would have to push through efficiency curves. Peter has the rate stuff to handle those curves.
Greg notes that we should think about what redshift range we want to say we've said something about.
Peter and Greg will write it up quickly. It will have big error bars, but it will probably already constrain a lot of models.
Greg gave a couple of reviews last week, one at the director's review, one at CfPA. He said they went very well, and that he got a compliement from Chris Stubbs about how we covered systematics.
Greg has also been loading on HST data... Albinoni and final refs, and he's out of room. He wants disks and computers and things.
Greg also has Jury duty coming up. He wasn't able to get off by claiming scheduled telescope time. He's got some thirty percent chance or something that he'll get stuck on a 3-week trial.
Peter cautious that those goign to the A-double-S should get rooms and such. Greg will go (general stuff). Gerson will go (time dilation and lightcurve shape and stretch). Don sent in a thing for an oral presentation on early lightcurve stuff. Peter has a poster on theoretical implications of stretch/luminosity, which Greg could present if necessary. (He can only go for three days.) (The meeting is Jan 4-9.) Saul will be giving a talk. Susana's going.
Gerson wants a calendar of what's going to happen. We don't have a calendar yet, but we should know in a few weeks. Things will start to get zooish in February. There are hanging questions about our doing an INT search (it looks like we might not), as well as how we're going to coordinate with EROS. QUEST will be in march. The NOAO search is late February and early March. We may not want EROS to start anything until mid to late February.
We're having a long discussion about trying to get the various CfHT time that people we know have to find supernovae we could use with Keck and HST, but I didn't keep good notes.
Robert has written a bunch of code. He's been working on some things like calendaring stuff. He's now working on code that will let you figure out how to prioitize observations from different sites and so forth. He's putting in hooks for things (like telescope zeropoints) that will allow all this calculation to be done.
Gerson says he's made considerable progress on the paper on time dilation, shape of the lightcurve, fitting the leibengut curve all the way down to time zero. He says that the paper will go out to the collaboration next week. Gerson says the idea is that Peter will have a paper which is a companion. Peter says it will be just on the theoretical stuff. He says he can write that up in about four weeks.
Don has made some minor changes to snminuit. As always, the version he regards as the master copy is in ~deg/idl/lightfits. There are readme files and things like that there. He has a demonstration of using a sixteen character name.
Don also talks about rise time. He says notice that all the fits he's going to show are based on stuff that are already stretch corrected. He says looking at rise time and such, you can only talk about relative things.
Don took all the data from June 13 (or some such) which was color corrected. He did the "inverse K correction" (i.e. on the supernova rather than on the template) to make them all consistent. He says that there are small differences from the June 13 set and the 18 September set, whatever all of that means. Peter asserts that the only difference is that there are the instrumental corrections in.
He says that there's one bad guy, 94G, which was discovered in I-band. It needs to be dropped because there isn't enough R-band to do R by itself. Because of this he has to do everything over again.
Rob threw a monkey on to the table, arguing about whether the cut Don made for "low z" and "high z" supernova is meaningful. He's drawing a conclusion of no evolutionary effect, but Rob is dubious that the way the cut was done makes the result meaningful. Rob asserts that given the distribution of our supernovae, we're drawing conclusions about evolution by comparing z=0.4 to z=0.48.
He also did a cut on low stretch vs. high stretch and didn't find a significant difference (I think).
Peter suggested after doing a fit to all 1400-odd points, do a cut to look at late and early behavior. He cuts at -4 days to look at the top half, and at +4 days to look at the bottom half. (They overlap so that in either fit you can get the peak.) He said that the results for the subsets are not much different.
He did fits with two templates: Leibengut with an exponential toe at the beginning, and with a parabolic toe tagged on. They are not significantly different. He's using the one with the parabolic toe.
Conclusion: that the template stretchs on both sides is exceedinly robust, Don says. Stretch is a wonderful parameter; it's all that's needed. It works to the earliest epochs. Peter wants a quantification: what's a upper limit on the change in stretch. He wants quantification and significance for his paper.
Sebastien is here. He's been setting up the software in France. People in France are working on different other software to see what they can do. They tried the EROS stuff Peida; not very friendly, and you "need your driving license to use it well." They did the INT search thing. They had a PC set up at the Canary Islands that they brought with them. They used a different subtraction software... which caused some trouble. He's now looking into deconvolution for analysis of photometry and lightcurves. He's working on making sure various methods conserve flux. He's looking into different methods.
Saul says at one point Julia Lee looked into how much we're loosing by doing a more robust aperture fit. He says she concluded that if you do well, the size of the gain in the error bars would be on the 15 percent level. (This was psf fitting versus aperture.)
Sebastien wants to do psf fitting as well. Saul worries that the systematics of this are a lot harder than they are with apertures.
Greg said he saw a recent paper about psf fitting by Alard. He says that subtraction with aperture photometry than psf fitting.
We talked a lot about photometric systematics, but my eyes glazed over. HST was mentioned near the end.
Gerson wants to know what's the status of our paper. Peter Heoflich is the "secret public" referee. Saul has talked with him. We've rewritten the theory section according to Peter's specifications. Saul was most concerned about the statement about error bars needing to be inflated because we don't know that various distributions are Gaussian. Saul is trying to work around some way of not claiming that things are Guassian. Saul's working on resampling code to deal with this. At the same time, he plugged in different values of R_B for the grey dust limits. Before he even started changing R_B, as you walk your way down throwing out the reddest supernovae, your percent confidence goes up that you aren't redder than the nearby sample, because you are biasing yourself to a bluer sample. Saul discovered that the systematics you get from a Gaussian track very well the Resampling, until you get rid of the reddest ones, at which point the resampling gives much higher confidence. So, in the end, it looks like you are actually more confident if you don't use a Gaussian.
Greg questions if this is simply because you are truncating your distribution. Greg's not sure that you can recalculate the jacknife after you've taken things out of your sample. Saul objects that what you're asking is, after you've thrown things out, how confident are you that your remaining distribution is bluer than the template distribution. This discussion should go offline.
Other than this, there are a few more political things to handle. He wants the systematic shift to go back into the main plot. It's already in another panel; Saul would rather add a sentence to the caption highlighting it, rather than adding it on to our main panels. Hoeflich had been under the mistaken impression that the other group had included systematic error in their comparison plot.
Saul says that it's a 2-day process at this point. After that, we'll send it back, and then'll we'll be ready to put it on the web and sent it in and be done with it.
There's some issue about Dier-Rotor or something like that that Peter and Saul are talking about. Me, we've been here 2 hours already, and haven't yet mentioned what I thought was the most important thing for us to talk about.
Susana tells us about how they're starting to do a search at Leuschner, or however you spell it. They observed a supernova, but it was one that was already found.
On the political issue, last week the Indians and the forest service and Mira got together, and they couldn't see the orange netting that Susana and Shawn had put out there. But, now, they (the Indian and the forest service) want it shifted over thirty feet to the west. This means that Susana and Shawn will have to go down, stake out, and do another transit survey.