Susana tells us that she didn't do much in the last week because she was out of town. She was at Case Western. Apparently they have a 1m class robotic telescope in the middle of a cornfield. Saul wonders if its good enough for our considering for complementary followup. Susana says, effectively, maybe, but probably not.
Re: our robotic telescope, it's all in message limbo, it seems. Suana says that Bruce (who?) tells her that there were new developments, but she doesn't yet know what.
Maria and Ana report on what they've been working on and learning how to do. They've been comparing new (followup?) images with the finding chart to try and figure out what's there with the supernovae. So far, they haven't really found one, but presumably they're still learning how to do it. They're looking at QB-something... Peter knows the full story about this, but he's not here at the moment. (Mark Phillips got a spectrum of it.) Work is still in progress.
Saul says that the Keck proposal (written by Isobel, with some Omega/Lambda projections for 2 Albinoi redshift supernovae done by Robert) did go off, Monday FedEx. I believe that the story this time around is that Reyland is going to find z>1 supernovae with CFHT, and we're going to get spectra of them with Keck. Reynald is trying to get time in August and September on CFHT, with three half-nights on the megacam. In that time, you can go just as deep as we did in the Albinoni search, with 5 or 6 times the area.
We have traded our April Keck night to Tom Broadhurst, who in turn is going to try to schedule a night for us in the fall. We may try to turn his one night into two half-nights. Whether or not we can trade our "usless" halves of nights is yet to be seen.
If CFHT search returns nothing, we can "always" search the Keck data, Saul says, glibly, ignoring the fact that we're probably never going to take the time necessary to publish a paper again. Well, in another year or two, it won't matter, because no TAC will give us time given our publication record. Indeed, we'll see what Keck does giving that zero publications related to Keck have come out since the last time they reamed us over for time.
The things left for proposal writing are: one VLT proposal in the next week and a half; Isobel's working on this, theoretically.
(I do seem to remember an agreement that we weren't going to observe next semester, so that we might catch up on our existing data and papers. But I was probably kidding myself in thinking that we might actually pay any attention to that agreement.)
(It's very difficult not to be scathingly cynical sitting in these meetings. I apologize for the tone.)
At least, despite some resistance, it seems we are going to avoid putting in any CTIO 4m and WIYN proposals. (We will have to put stuff in next semester to get final refs for the nearby supernovae, spectra of nearby host galaxies, and any deepsearch final refs that we fail to get this year.)
Saul talks about longterm nearby supernova searching. So far we're doing OK this semester. We have on the order of 40 supernovae. Slightly more than half are Ia (Susana says 23). 17 are "the ones we wanted," i.e. z<0.15, caught near max. (EROS has been doing well recently, and we have a new one today which might be a week old (sad) from Spacewath.) Of the 15 (or so) that aren't Ia's, about 8 or 9 (maybe 10) are bona fida II's, two Ic's, and about 3 that we weren't able to classify (e.g. because they were at too high z, so we didn't burn the time, or because we just can't figure out what the spectrum is).
We're doing pretty well considering we have nothing from QUEST. QUEST has yet to return any supernovae. Indeed, if we get data from them which is not fresh (i.e. more than a few days old), it's probably not worth trying to follow their stuff up.
Susana wonders if Peter is surprised that there are "so many" Ia's. Peter says that he actually expected to have more like 3/4 of them to be Ia's. Some of this has to do with the fact that the searches are going deeper than we had hoped for (esp. EROS, but also Spacewatch). As you go deep, and you don't have a big honkin' telescope for spectra, you are going to prefer the supernovae with nice hosts. This is no longer a really magnitude-limited search.
Of our Ia's, EROS found something like 7 of them; 15 total supernovae came from EROS. There are still a few we're waiting to knock off.
Heck, the numbers are flying about. Do NOT trust anything you read here. I'm going to give up on trying to keep track of the numbers of what came from where.
Of course, out of all of this, it sounds like we're now thinking about trying to keep getting supernovae from EROS through next fall so we can do queue stuff at VLT, and of COURSE all of it is NO work for any of us since we don't actually go to any telescope. I'm gonna hurl.
Back to the currently going search, a lot of the data is going to come from YALO. This is worrisome, because Nick Sunszetff has had trouble doing the color terms for this telescope. We'll have to worry about this if we're really going to use these lightcurves. Peter does say that in many occasions, we have photometry taken within a day on another telescope.
Nobody knows what's going on with Mt. Laguna. We think that they know to look at WhatsUp, but we don't know if they know to check things out and back in.
Brenda is exhausted from working on the Broadhurst Keck proposal (she drove it down the other day). She has found several cases looking at the YALO data where the pointing of the telescope was off by about an arcminute. This isn't perhaps that big a deal, since the images she's looking at are subsets of the full image. However, she hasn't been able to identify the positions of the supernovae in some of these images.
In two cases they were off by at least 20 arcminutes. In one case they were off by 10 degrees.
Saul also wants to raise the HST stuff that Alex and Brenda are working on. Brenda hasn't been able to do anything in the last week. Alex says there was some issue about Reynald and Sebastien asking about the Set F data, and Alex couldn't find it.
Alex says that Greg's suggestion for the problem was that our centroiding software doesn't do a very good job with HST PSFs. So far, it looks like that could be the problem. He's using Tiny Tim PSFs, and our software is returning stuff that is off by 0.3-0.4 pixels... and in the same direction. Rob wonders if the problem could have something to do with the deifintion of pixel n.0: edge or center of pixel?
Robert is showing us the Omega/Lambda probability plots he did for the keck proposal. He's added various fictitious supernovae to our 42, assuming they all fall at the center of our confidence region, and seen what the new results are. One thing adds 11 HST supernovae (which we haven't analyzed yet), another thing adds fictitious Albinoni and two more fictitious Keck supernovae. (Hey, it was for a proposal.)
Tom has a hubble diagram too. He's working on dust. He's put a line on for Omega=0.2, Lamdba=0, and some extinction: Zeta=0.2. This is the hubble length divided by the extinction mean free path for the dust. This is a model of uniform dust throughout the universe. This is based on "needle-like" dust (which Tom has been reading about) that has more opacity per unit mass, and reddens less than normal dust.
Peter's been reading about this dust; apparently it comes from winds off of red giants, and this is probably not long enough to spread the dust uniformly throughout space.
Mike says that not much new has happened. He's been running a lot of our fields through his movement software. He has a few candidates, and he's trying to get photometry to get colors. Some of his candidates move by 0.1-0.2"/year. He's going to give a lunchtime talk on this on April 23. We wonder about doing followup with BTC or the WIYN Queue.
Saul mentions that there's a paper on astro-ph today about white dwarf proper motion searches. He suggests that Mike looks at this to see what their deal is, and how it compares to what we have.
Rob mentions that he's finally getting back to the Albinoni ground based stuff. Thinking about this, we need to start pressing getting the HST figured out, and all the CTE stuff. Brenda, Alex, etc. need to get together to start figuring out this HST stuff so we can use that data, both on our BTC supernoave and on Albinoni. It looks like we're setting up yet another group meeting on Friday afternoon to talk just about this.
Saul also mentions that we are looking into another NEAT-Like search. It's the "Linear" search, run by MIT/Lincoln labs behind some security fence or another at White Sands. Apparently they observe the entire visible sky twice a month. They have 2.something" pixels. If the seeing is bad enough.... They say they go down to 20th magnitude. We're starting to think about working with them, getting an LDRD collaborated with Bill Saphir, and buying lots of computers to do lots of things with it.