(Yes, I know it's NSF, but I thought I'd take the typo and fly with it.)
As we get here, Saul is talking to Susanna about her NFS proposal for the nearby search at Chew's Ridge....
Saul says he's been talking to ST... our problem is that right now they want us to tell them which objects to observe by December 30, which of course is before our first Keck night.
Peter is working on the Nature paper revisions. He says an hour after the group meeting he can hand Saul everything. The figure captions are going to grow infinitely... which is odd, but that's what they want us to do. There is some debate about whether or not we will ever try to publish in Nature again. The idea is to have everything done by the end of the week. (Peter says that he has also addressed all of the issues from the international collaborators.)
Saul wants to talk about the main stumbling blocks about what we want to get through regarding getting a paper out before the December 28 run. (Yipes!)
Gerson is making a proposal, saying that we quote Omega_M, and then include several other numbers which show how it changes as if features outside our control change, such as script-M from the nearby SNe, color (if you can somehow quantify it). Gerson wants a simple one-line list of all sorts of effects in errorbars, but Saul thinks that it won't be this simple to do.
Stuff which needs to be completed:
Figure out which subset is completed enough of the lightcurve to be used for significant results. Of this, there is a subset which does have color info and a subset which does not have color info. (Necessary.)
We need to create an Hamuy template, one with color correction, one based on a single filter, for comparison with our two substs. Do we need this?
Track down sigma_B-V.
Worry about our errors. There is some suggestion that the fiducial errors are expanding our data error more than they ought to. Track this down and fix.
Greg questions: are there enough SNe with good enough colors to make any kind of color correction worth doing? Saul answers that we do seem to have a few that are far enough out it's clear they "should" be cut, and that the remaining RMS is better. However, the question is, do we do a route where we do everything without color.
K-corrections. Peter says that if we do color-indepenedent stuff without waiting for Alex's analysis, we have to do it at redshifts which we know there aren't systematic effects which could zap us.
K-correction as a function of B&H E(B-V). Peter says in 99% of the cases the E(B-V) is zero, but not in all of the Hamuy cases (which will affect script-M.
In any event, we have to clean up the results from the first seven to do with the new K-corrections. We need to understand how the first 7 supernovae differ from the 0.45 guys so that we know why we're seeing different results. Could it all be K-corrections? The difference could also be that the first 7 were predominantly from ellipticals, while the new ones are from dusty star-forming reasons. Different population, extinction statistics, etc.
Most important first thing is to redo the first seven with our current techniques.
In other words, it's starting to sound like we need the new Alex templates before we can do anything. Or is it? Many things are unclear.
It looks like what we should focus on is explaining why we are seeing a difference between the first 7 SNe and the collection of SNe at z=0.45. First is reanalyzing the first 7 SNe with our current techniques.
Greg also wants to go back and try and address some of these thigns like extinction, Malmquist bias, and so forth, to see if we can come up with effects.
Matthew points out that when the search was done, the subtraction software was probably different from the software used for the efficiencies. Perhaps the Malmquists found weren't relevant? Perhaps we need to go back with the latest software and look yet again at the first seven SNe to see if we can find any new faint SNe.
Saul is hypothesizing that even once we do fix the K-corrections, all of the first 7 SNe will still be on the higher Omega side of the rest. But first we have to do it.
We've talked a lot about these SNe. We discussed the odds of a supernova being a Type II is slim, because the magintude would be way off at a given redshift. The probability of a AGN is slim, because it shouldn't have had a reasonable-stretch lightcurve, and because if we have even a host galaxy spectrum we might have seen it as an AGN.