Saul has declared critical mass, even though Peter isn't here.
Patricia tells us she hopes she can tell us something next week or in two weeks. Saul asks if there is any minor news on the way. "I think we are getting there." Greg says the bugs are gone, but we all know what it means when somebody says the bugs are gone.
What is Nelson's deal? Nelson is working on a 4d fit to duplicate what Peter did for purposes of confirmation. He can run it on 4 PCs in 1 hour, with a coarse grid. Saul says something about error bars being different from what Peter had... Nelson is convinced that he knows what he's doing, and that program is doing the right thing, so he wants to get the exact expression for what Peter is doing. Apparently, earlier, there were identical error bars, but now they don't agree, so somewhere somebody's calculating an error bar incorrectly. This needs to be tracked down between Peter and Nelson.
Rob talks about K-corrections. He's been thinking about the issue of counts versus energy. He will write this up in greater detail later, but his current thought is that they should be done as energy integrals, but because of the way Peter does it, it doesn't matter.
Alex is working on running a fake supernova subtraction on the Keck service images. He is very deep into this. He's only just got it working for him with old images already in the database. However, it's still a problem with the Keck images. He's convinced that it's not going to work well with Keck, partly because of problems with the rectangular shapes of the images. This is bugs in code, which Rob asserts we should be able to find and fix. The next problem is that the fringing is horrible, because we weren't able to fix the fringing on the images. (There weren't enough images to make a fringe map.)
Peter: he is running fits. He's working on the Mark Phillips Hubble Deep Field supernovae. They found 2 supernovae by taking 6 I-band exposures a year after the HDF was first observed. Their limiting magnitude was 27.1 in the Hubble I-band filter. They had 2 20-sigma supernovae using a blink method... with nothing else down to 5 sigma, Peter says. This surprises Saul, would would have expected them to find more dimmer stuff. Peter plots his predicted observed rate, which includes selection effects (UV spectrum cutoff causes you to miss higher redshift thingies). Redshifts were z=0.95, and then one at 1.3 (which was 8 or 9 sigma, Peter seems to recall).
We discuss the fact that the rate seems to be such that in any given HST field, you should find a supernova. Should we be able to find more supernovae in our HST frames? How would we search for this? We don't have references. If the rate is what Phillips suggests, then we really ought to go in and search for supernova lightcurves.
Greg says, however, that he would be incredulous if you really can find this many, based on calculations he's done before. It would mean that the rates would really have to zoom at higher redshifts, in contrast to theory from Pilar and such.
Discussion is segue-ing into proposing for an HST search. Peter wants to get Phillips to do a reverse search to see if there are also two fading supernovae... if there are, then we ought to do the search. (Although, then, the issue is that the other group will see what we are thinking and put in their own proposal.) Now this is starting to go into a dicussion of collaboration administration and politics issues, so my eyes will begin to glaze over....
Greg now mentions that the HDF was done over time, and there might be SN lightcurves in there that we could do. How fast could we do this, and could we do it fast enough to put a proposal in? Proposals are due in early September.
Peter wants to do a search of the Hubble archives and find out how often there are images of the same spot on the sky taken over time.
For the search method, Greg thinks the way to do it is to make a catalog of everythign you detect, and find things which have variable lightcurvs. He thinks this is easier than subtracting. The problem with subtracting is that we have severely undersampled images. Who is in a position to do this? We seem to be converging on Alex (Conley, not Kim or Filippenko). Perhaps Kirsten could work on this as well... Peter says that she will be done fairly quickly with the thing she's working on.
Kirsten is working on spectrum stuff. She has a chisquare program which fits for the flux ratio between different subdivisions of the spectrum and for reddening. She's taking supernova spectra and fitting them to an entire set of templates, to try and identify things. She's been working with Peter on this. Hopefully this will be a robust (more so than what Adam did for the snapshot work) and quantifiable way (completely with robust error estimates) of comparing a supernova spectrum to a template. One of the next things on the list of things to do is to put in some sort of host galaxy subtraction.
Gerson is re-doing the time dilation using the new measurements and stretch stuff and so forth. He's made a list, for which Peter gives him the K-corrections, and Gerson is waiting for Peter on this. Insert nag here. Peter devotes his full attention to this tomorrow, he says, because all the fits will be done by then.
Susana tells us that she has students (Homan and James) taken data and learning how to use the telescope. Their project for the summer is determining the full charactistics of the telecope observationally, which has never been done.
Any day now, we'll be moving.
--Susana
I see, so it will be the same day when we send off our paper.
--Gerson
It probably has a higher paper than when we send off the paper.
--Gerson
I'm not going to hold my breath on either of them, or on the difference between them.
--Peter
Now Susana is working on a conference proceedings. Scary how these sorts of things keep coming up.
Saul mentions that the talks from the Cern meeting are now on the web (all the transparencies). Somewhere under Cern... no URL immediately available.
Robert is still working on the host galaxies. He's got Kron radii, profiles, and magnitudes for most of the 35 host galaxies. Greg shows some pictures which Robert made. He shows 9624, which was an ostensible no-host galaxy that does a have a weak host that Robert was able to mine out. Greg thinks that they are getting close to finishing this sort of thing. The next thing to do would be to work on the dyanmic scheduler.
Re: the question of final refs, Greg looked at RPS2 to see what our observing iwndows are. For sets F and G, for all but two supernovae, we can get them up through October 28. We're already on the calendar for those already. There are two, howver, for which the last day we can observe them is August 28, which is the start of the Week of the 24th by HST scheduling, which means that a week before that we have to tell them when to point, and three weeks before that we have to tell them to put it on the calendar. So, in about a week, we have to decide. Greg has asked Shane to make these guys a priority for NICMOS coadding, so that we can decide if we need to do this or not.
Saul brings back the issue that should we get more final images in WFPC for purposes of this search... that would make our case stronger if you had a point down the bottom. However, the resolution is high enough that the galaxy is weak. Greg and Peter both are convinced that it wouldn't help much.
We're back into a discussion of this HST search. Can we find something at HST shortly before going to Keck, and use Keck time to sit on one of these supernoave? We would pick the one which had the earliest morphological type, so as to avoid blueness in the galaxy and have the best hope of actually getting a supernova spectrum.