Warning: The tone of these notes is more particularly cynical than usual (which is probably already worse than it ought to be). Reading them during reformatting in January, 2000, even I was a little shocked by how rude they are, and I wrote them. So, apologies in advance for any rudeness which is below; they may say something about my state of mind last summer, and the boiling over with my frustrations in our group meeting format (which got pretty bad with the headcount last summer). You have been warned.
Contents:
"Mabye we should start talking just so we can get through everybody's updates quickly," Saul says.
The use of the term "everybody's" before the term "updates" indicates one of my major beefs with these meetings. So, on we go around the circle. Sheesh.
Hung-Chung talked to Alex Kim, and says that he understands a lot more having done this. He's trying to write out something about the actual procedures, but he's talking quietly enough that I can't really tell what he's saying.
Saul wants him, in a few weeks, to give a little summary of what he understands so far, so that we can all comment on it.
Jason and Michelle are getting ready for the "thing" and are leaving next Wedneday. Whatever that means.
Robert is still trying to get all his stuff done before he leaves. One thing, it seems, is to parallelize some lightcurve thing or another from Alex Kim. Some of what they're talking about is a little mysterious. This is another thing I'd like to point out about these group meetings. We get an individual update from somebody, only later getting the background to have made the initial update even potentially worth our time. It's in the sort of detail that Saul cares about, but why do they have this conversation in front of everybody?
Alex Conley says he has nothing interesting to report, but Saul drags words out of him. "Remind me where you are." He's trying to find systematics in "what's going wrong." Sounds good. Despite efforts to coax more details out of him, he won't give them, on the basis that 80% of the people present wouldn't care. I laud Alex for this: really, it makes more sense to avoid those sorts of discussions in front of the entire group.
Saul told Matthew to look into the search software, and Rob told him that it is all basically working since we've used it for two runs. (Why an end run around me was necessary is unclear.) Instead, Matthew is building tools for tracking the subtractions so we can keep track of what subtractions ahve been done and so forth.
Michael is looking into the subtraction software and trying to see what he can do about the subtraction software. Right now, he's tryign to figure out how you judge what a good subtraction is. The next thing is teaching the software how you judge what a good candidate is. Michael is also under tutelage from Robert to learn about his Java stuff. Michael points out that he is going to be gone during August. In the fall, he will be teaching and taking classes; he'll try to stay in touch, but won't be working full time.
Kirsten has been taking more exciting journeys into the world of data reduction. She's also read "more stuff on the wavelets," and says something about Numerical Recipes code. (In short, snippets of a conversation that she and Peter might want to have, and which is a little mysterious to the rest of us who don't know the backstory. Why must we do this each week in front of the whole group?)
Maria and Ana are also reducing data. They are doing "photometry and standard stars." They are doing some KPNO data from the nearby search (I believe). Details about using IRAF and DAOPHOT and so forth.
Dan Kasen has been working on "the simulator" for the satellite. It's up there taking data right now. Right now, given a list of supernova, it tries to go up and take spectra of all of it. He's looking into trying to do the imaging at the same time as a bonus. (I'm having a little trouble seeing how you could image and take spectra in the same wavelengths at the same time without a whole second telescope, or otherwise splitting up the signal.)
Don's been working pretty hard on the rise time part of the paper. Saul pointed out to Don that the stretch and the time of max are highly correlated, in terms of moving things back and forth to keep the lines going through the early points. Saul says that we may know that a single lightcurve fits all of the data very well, but that we may not know exactly what that single lightcurve is. In particular, the stretch versus the time of max may mean that we are fooling ourselves on how well we know the rise time. This could have some bearing on the recent report from Adam Reiss that local supernovae have a different rise time from distant supernova.
Saul is going to e-mail or talk to the other group, and ask them to correct the impression in their paper that we have a result that's out and published. The paper is based on data which is a preliminary conference proceeding, and that that's not the same as a final paper we're putting out. (Best of Both Worlds Department: list all conferences as "publications" to pad your publication list, but don't count that as data being put out.) (Wow... Greg just pointed out the Best of Both Worlds thing, though he stated it better. We wanted to use the BAAS as precedence for discovery of the cosmological constant, but then we turn around and want to tell folks not to trust things they get out of conferences.)
Saul says re: the satellite story that we're still trying out more ideas. Tomorrow, "we" are going to talk to James Graham about the idea of considering a fourier transform spectrometer.
Michael Levy has been working on the satellite, especially manpower issues. He wants to try to shake down the laboratory to get us mechanical and electrical engineering support; that's probably going to happen. He's also trying to get startup money to get a formal proposal written. Michael has been working on the design for the imager, and has been working with a PhD student Carl Grace, whose project is a cutom readout chip for the CCDs for the Satellite. (A billion pixel array is a big thing even on the ground.) He's also trying to get a demonstration array of LBL CCDs built, because the LBL CCDs are one of the nominally high risk elements of the imager.
Michael says we have authority from the division to hire a post-doc for the Satellite, and there's another position on campus, and we're trying to get a third post-doc position out of the local physics division.
Saul says the bottom line is that if anybody knows anybody who's a top-notch candidate, we should let them know that we have these jobs coming available.
For the fall very-high redshift supernova run (CFHT search with Keck spectrocopy and a little VLT followup), Saul says that we're going to treat this as a shakedown run, and not the one where we put all our eggs. Reasons are that the HST is going to have a refurbishing gap right at the wrong time. Next spring will be the time when we try to do this. Hopefully Keck will be better in the spring as well, since Richard Ellis will be at Caltech and may be able to contribute some Keck time. Finally, Subaru may be ready to start doing something with their big wide field prime focus camera by next spring. They want to be searching next spring. (So will we search with CFHT?) Saul spoke to Reynald today, and the two fields he was suggesting are fields being targeted by the LeFevre high redshift survey being done at the VLT.
Rob asks where the search will happen and whose doing it. The French have practise data from June, and in the next three days will get more data from the same field. Ideally they will have tuned both their software and our software. Rob suspects that "our software" in France is nearly two years out of date. The French want to be running a search at the CFHT with their software, and then somebody else back elsewhere running our software on it as well. Their committment is to make this their job. Saul says that Reynald asserts that the French group will be doing all the searching work, so that we won't have to worry about getting ready for it and running the search this time around.
There is some Yale WIYN time sometime in October, which we might be able to use for screening, but Greg will have to think about it ahead of time. It will depend on the seeing at WIYN, and what Reynald comes up with, and so forth.
Saul dosn't know anything about the LDRD money for the supernova factory. They won't meet until August to decide that. Saul thinks that it seems to be a high priority, but there is no hard data.