Saul's been talking about dust calculations he did, but I didn't get it down because I was trying to get the bloody laptop to boot.
One punchline: the paper's reviewer objected that we shouldn't treat our errors as Gaussian when estimating the probability that various subsamples are red relative to the Hamuy supernovae. Saul, doing a resampling, found that it makes almost no difference if you do it with resampling or if you assume Gaussian errors and distribution.
Saul has to do one more iteration with Peter Hoeflich, with all the little updates. If he answers quickly, then we'll be finished, and we can put it on astro-ph, and so forth.
Saul got an E-mail from Richard Ellis, who was going to go work with Richard Estaphiew (or however you spell it). Richard had a paper that Saul thought it sounded like they were fully analyzing the supernova data; Saul asked him to reformulate it so it doesn't come out as their analysis of our data (since we sent them the actual data).
Don thinks the problem is that we've presented things at meetings for so long that it's an impediment that we don't have a preprint yet that we can send out for people to quote real references.
Don and Gerson have a paper which they need to discuss with Saul, and then see how Peter feels about it, before sending it out to the general group. There are, as always, authorship issues.
Saul asks for getting a table of stretch left/stretch right for three different stretch ranges. This information is what Peter is waiting for for his paper.
Susana tells us that they had a HD failure out at the telescpe. Vlad resuscitated it long enough to get the data off of it. They've ordered two new 18gig drives for Goddess (out at the telescope), and one for Athena. There is some issue with code and such.
It looks like they're going to go up to Chew's ridge after all. So, now, they basically have the go-ahead. There are still issues with things like money and weather, of course.
Saul says that we've been looking into the use of a 1m telescope at Mt. Laguna. We may be able to take over 30 half-nights of grey and dark time during the months of March and April. This would be through Laird Thompson at illinois. The bad news is that their seeing isn't great; it's down to two arcseconds. Greg put in a request for 10 nights at Lick 40"; there's a possibility that they'll do the observations for us. There's also the possibility of working with Alex Rudolph and students at Harvey Mudd, on their 1m telescope at Table Mountain. Both Table Mountain and Laguna have issues with seeing, but we'll find out.
The YALO question is still in the air. It looks like we'll get about 14 nights equivalent, although it's not clear how this will be accomplished. There will probably be some trade of telescope time. We will trade time on some telescope which is less convenient for us to use.
Greg tells us that Robert now has some of his tools on a web page off of the groupwork home page.
Greg wants to contact Jane Luu at stanford, and see if she's interested in searching for Kuiper belt objects in our data. This may be a project for a student or temporary person, if it's self contained enough, and if they can have it work up here. Otherwise, it will be a collaborative sort of effort.
Susana asks about mining the data for other science. Greg is interested in doing I-band correlation function on the Keck data to fainter magnitudes, though when he has time to do it is a big question. Susana also asks about mining our CTIO data. Sebastien and Bruce were supposed, at one point, to be working on the rates of GRB afterglow transients. Susana wonders about the AGN search that the Richards in England were doing. Greg mentions that he's doing a search for halo white dwarfs with Mike Moyer, searching via proper motion.
Don talks about CCDs. Steve went down to Lick to test CCDs in the lab on Friday. However, he got nothing because the probe cards were bad. He had two chips wired up, a 512 and a 2048, and both were out of alignment. Steve brought home the good wafer. Yeterday they were supposedly testing it on another chip, to see at least if things get lined up.
Saul talked to James Graham about our CCDs and NGST.
Saul is going to have a folder on the main page that has all of our color figures, for easy printing. These will be ones that has the citation. (This came up because Rob asked about sending color figures to Alex Rudolph at Harvey Mudd.)
Alex is still trying to get his list of matched objects to go through ffieldmatch. It still doesn't work.
Greg is working on the Albinoni paper, doing boilerplate stuff.
Gerson asks Rob about what supernovae beyond the 42 we have. Rob says that there are another 10-15 from last January's run, but we don't have final references on those yet. (That's what Don and Susana will do in December at CTIO.)
Computers stuff. Saul and Rob are looking into using the Physics division's Linux PCs down in NERSC land.
Gerson, who talked on campus, had a graduate student Michael Wood-Vansey (or similar spelling) who was intereted in working with us. He still has to take is prelims, but he was interested in working with us. He will probably come to the next Wednesday meeting.