Saul has gone back and forth with the referee, and sent in the latest version to the editor of ApJ. It sounds like the paper isn't officially accepted yet, but we can count it as effectively being accepted as soon as the scientific editor has approved it. So we wait for the referee to send it in. About a minute ago Saul, said he got a mail that says "got it". With the obvious interpretation, the paper is accepted. Other than residual making sure, I think our lives are complete and we can now all safely die.
Saul says he's gotten the stuff in, but hasn't yet sent in the version that they need for the publication office. So, he's got to get rid of the BibTeX stuff and so forth. Well, Peter says he doesn't need to, as long as he word his cover letter strongly enough. Saul is also creating the final web version, so we can fully release this puppy.
There is discussion of a party. Me, I think it's been just too long.
Composite lightcurve stuff. We have numbers now that Peter needs for the comparison of left and right stretches for three stretch subsamples (low, middle, high stretch). You find that you get back the same stretch on just the left side and on the right side within the stretch, within the error (typically about 0.02). The typical range in the stretches is about 7%.
Saul says that he is going to take a cut at the paper. Gerson has taken it over since Don has turned to work on the SPIE paper on optical properties of CCDs. Peter says that once Saul has something with fixed numbers that everybody is happy with, he can take the numbers and work them into his paper on this topic.
Peter did some calculations with star formation rate, number counts, luminosity functions, etc. He's figured out that people ought to start considering our values for Omega/Lambda. The results in a flat Omega=1 universe are significantly different from a flat Omega=0.3 universe. For instance, he now thinks that the Type II supernova rate out in the HDF should be of order half what he used to think it should be.
Peter is very pessimistic about the ability of anybody to find and do anything with Type II supernovae at any kind of distance.
Peter says that Greg showed him the spectrum of the pivot star used to find Albinoni. It's a M2.7-dwarf. Peter Hauschildt and Peter found a spectrum in their spectrum library that they ought to be able to flux off of it, so that we can use this as a limitation on how good our Albinoni flux calibrations are. Hauschildt is going to be running some models on the T3E. Already, they've seen that red end drops off a little to fast. This is probably a result of our not being at the paralactic angle. Of course, things are complicated, e.g. with alignment and so forth.
All the Hubble images of Albinoni have been taken (3 total, I think). The last datapoint hasn't been shipped to us yet, but it's been taken. Tomorrow, our last final ref with NICMOS is supposed to be taking. NICMOS is still chugging along.
We got way ahead of ourselves in terms of deciding if our reference was good enough already to do cosmology without waiting for a final reference.
The paper Greg is working on does not present a cosmology result. He's presenting the supernova and its spectrum. The focus of the paper will be rates.
On December 8th, our CTIO friends start their search on the Mosaic telescope on Kitt Peak. They have an 8-night run. They will obtain refs for five nights. If they get all of those five nights, they will start searching using the remaining three nights. They are going to search using software that Lou Strogler has written. Chris has talked Greg to getting the data to us for a parallel search. If we can establish that we can turn this data around effectively and efficiently, it might help convince them that really they do want to be working with us in February and March....
This raises a number of details and questions. However, we need computing resources, disk storage resources, and human scanners. The search will go through the 15th. The search would be those last three days. It would be fast and furious and scary.
We might actually be able to get some spectra of these. It turns out that the RC spectrograph at CTIO is block scheduled. The night before ours at CTIO is the Engineering run that puts on the BTC. The possibility is asking them to move the Engineering night to Thursday (what was our first night), and then us using the spectrometer on the 16th. It's all very speculative. If they find anything (already a bit of a worry), they will probably only find two or three. Are the spectra worth it, especially given we won't have any other followup? It wouldn't use the full night.
There's also the tantalizing possibility of getting a spectrum of the gravitational lens arc in the southern HDF.... This is a longshot, probably hard, but you could get some cosmology out of this. Before we get too far into this, we should make sure that we're not overfilling our plate with yet another project that isn't part of our main thrust. We should talk to Brenda about this, since she does lenses and arcs and things. We should find out if she's got the time to figure out what's going on.
Other nearby stuff: Greg heard from Heidi that we have a few nights on the APO 3m. Dick Joyce at KPNO called Greg re: scheduling the 4m and 2.1m Kitt Peak nights. The last thing Greg wants to know before laying down nights on the calendar is when the Moasic spring search is going to be.
One thing we're going to run into is figuring out how to get people sent out to these telescopes. The manpower may turn out to be an issue.
Back to getting ready for the run. Saul is calling Jim Seigrist and asking him about getting the computing stuff we need immediately, specifically lots of disk space very very soon.
We've having a long discussion about the computing power and processing that we will need in order to get this done. Peter thinks that even if everything works perfectly, we're going to have trouble getting everything done in two days.
Now we're talking about computing resources. I didn't take it down. It's getting heated and gory.
Robert has created a draft of the nearby search web page, with links to his Java programs. There are some Java issues... Netscape doesn't do Java as happily as we'd like.
Alex Conley is busy with end of the semester crunch stuff.
Saul tells us about the CCD chips. Last time, they had bad probe cards. Using smaller probe cards, the dark current was found to be too high for the 15micron pixel CCDs uncooled. The 24micron pixel CCDs, however, worked fine warm, and we got an image out of it. Note that this was not with the high-resistivity silicon. This was with the dummy one that went through it, for purposes of testing the processes.