I got here late. TWo fingers are taped together, so we shall see.
Greg is talking about NEAT, some JPL asteroid search that runs on an Air Force telescope out in Haleakala. They do huge area, and could presumably contribute greatly to our nearby search, but there are issues. The greatest is that the air force is refurbishing the telescope, and the guys at JPL don't know if they will really get to observe in February.
The search would be well situated. Greg says that they say that it would be OK for us to access the data, as long as they are collaborators. There are issues we have to explore about how we can get the data here.
There are issues of month vs. 3-6 day baselines. Their run is currently 6 nights. Saul wonders if they could trade nights in order to separate their runs so that there are two three night runs separated by 3 nights. In the future, apparently, they are going to move to another telecope and run for 18 nights.
They search in the V band, apparently.
Saul is wondering what data transfer practise we could do. Greg says they discussed trying to squeeze it through their T1 line, trying to accelerate the shipment of DLTs to 1/day (coming here first, before it goes to JPL), or (the one that gives Rob a heart attack) is getting our software running on their server. (Indeed, Rob vetoes that outright. Our software requires work on our part to get things working, and there is just too much going on at the moment.)
On other nearby issues, Greg says that we now have an agreement with EROS, and they are now taking images.
He's also talking about Chris Smith's group. They have 2 PCs running up there. We are going to loan them an 18GB drive, plus there will be the courier drive (hard disk shell game). We have tapes from their December run, which Rob is now processing.
There is confusion regarding what is going to happen with QUEST and Brad at Yale. It sounds like they aren't really so excited about trying to get things turned around quick enough for what we want. Apparently Brad is viewing this run as a trial run, whereas this is our period of big push....
Two arcsecond seeing matters to him; it doesn't matter to us.
--Greg Aldering
Two arcsecond seeing sounds very sad to me.
--Don Groom
Greg says that apparently we now have the 16 nights of YALO follwoup time we thought we were going to have all along. It seems Anna called some bluff or something. Greg reports that Chris Smith says that YALO photometry doesn't transform to the standard system, though, so it's just as well that we aren't so dependent on them any more.
Lots of discussion about the details of followup scopes and time.
Mosaic strategy. In December, they got lots of reference images. In February, the first 3/4 of each night will be searches of those reference images. The last 1/4 will be new template. In March, they have another 5 nights, in which they will search everything they can get access to in March.
Saul suggests we talk to Delphin and Alex to ask about what backgrounds we're going to see. Apparently, we're more likely to get variable stars than AGN. We'll have to worry about getting rid of variable stars. We may have to think about dealing with the hosts in these case, to make sure that we have something that looks like a supernova.
There are also issues of photometric followup and having tools necessary to deal with this. Robert will probably be drafted into doing something.
Different topic. Saul had a long conversation with Wendy Freeman about the final stages of the Hubble Key Project. They're hoping to finally finish this spring, and have a big meeting this summer in which to show everybody everything. This means a big push to analyze all their HST data. They've been doing everything two ways, with two different teames of people. One uses DoPhot, one uses DAOPhot, and they disagree with each other, and they also disagree with Abi Saha's original analysis for Sandage. They are finding a number of things including apparently that the charge transfer efficiency and the long/short exposure problems are all worse than anybody thought. They are sensitive to position, background brightness, object brightness, color.... Apparently you need a complicated algorithm in order to regenerate the CCD image you want to work with. It sounds like a huge bear, and they haven't finished it yet. We might want to give Stetson another month, and then maybe some of us should go and sit with him, and figure out what's going on and whether we believe it. Somehow also we're supposed to convince him to help us figure out how to rewrite all his software to work with the sorts of field we have.
Saul also asked her about the CCDs decaying from cosmic ray bombardment. That could make it more complicated, but apparently that's a smaller effect than everything else.
At this point, everybody should panic.
Alex has made advances on HST transformations. He doesn't want to embarass himself by explaining it, but he was forced to. He had transposed two variables. He's now dealing with the fact that the residuals aren't as good as they are with the BTC (being a factor of 2-6 worse). He's trying to figure out where that's coming from, and figure out if it is anything systematic. Alex is also worried about whether the polynomial fit is accurate enough to describe the distortions... he doesn't believe the distortion model that comes from the HST to the sub-pixel level.
There is some thought of trying a lower order transformation to see if it's any better. Also, Greg wants to see if things are better when the images aren't much rotated relative to each other.
It was nice to have something work.
--Alex Conley
Peter and Greg ran into somebody at the AAS. Hy Spinrad, Greg tells us, will be sitting on one field for 20 orbits. The numbers suggest a 10% chance of finding a supernova, so he and Peter don't think it's worth trying.
There is a thought, however, of trying to search our final reference images for supernova, using the 1-year baseline. Of course, it's not clear what we could do with them if we found them.
Next issue: we also have to get the RPS2 for the Ellis HST stuff in.
This meeting is going long.
Don says that he gave his SPIE talk, and met a lot of people.
Robert is still working on WhatsUp. He's added a sorting feature to the candidate priority fields.
Mike gave up on figuring out Ivan's C aperture code. He will no longer bother trying to propogate centroid errors. However, they have enough data that they don't need that, they can use statistics to determine errors.
Gerson has pretty pictures. Now he's plotted the individual supernovae on his best composite lightcurve. He also has deviation plots. There are some odd ones where it looks like all the deviations are high. Some have too good chisquares, some have bad ones. Greg suggests that Gerson histogram the chisquares.