Short meeting, because the first news item is that we are going to try to get the paper out today if we can. There are lots of details and many touchy issues with Alex (where in many cases we're not going to along with what he wants to do) (like every other author, of course).
Saul says Robert has given him some ages of the univrse. Take the probability for all Omega and Lambdas, and weight the age by that probability, and you get the probability for the universe age. If H0=63, it's about 14.4 Gyr.
Later on, Robert brings in plots with Age of the Universe (for H0=63). He has 14.624 +0.836 - 1.087 Gyr. In the flat universe, he gets 14.938 +1.331 -1.035 Gyr. Much discussion of why the probability distribution is jagged for the flat universe. Ways for producing a smooth curve were presented. Greg argues that rather than picking the highest bin, we should do a little interpolative fit over the peak to find the "real" peak of the distribution.
Mike made some histograms of position differences between his various centering algorithms. He's got this 0.5 pixel offset on his medianing. Rob cautions to check whether .0 means the left side or center of the pixel. Mike thinks he will be able to work through this today or tomorrow.
He has distributions for his Gaussian and Median algorithms, compared to the Moment algorithm. He says that the median looks the best right now. (I'm not sure exactly what all these algorithms are; more details may be in last week's notes, but if not, you should ask Mike Moyer if you want formulae and things.)
Markus is writing a program which for given cosmology parameters, redshift, and band, tells you the apparent magnitude (of a supernova) in this band. This code will be checked against code Peter has which already does this. Peter says that he gave Markus everything he needs. Greg gave Markus the J, H, and K filters. Greg notes that after Markus writes this, he should writes something that gives a scaleable photon flux... that will be more useful for choosing filters than choosing magnitudes (since magnitudes are defined such that most of the information would be washed out).
Alex. In theory, he's going to be loading the HST images into the database tomorrow, but today he's doing lots of classes and things. Richard Ellis asks for stuff so that he can put them into the proposals. (Host colors and magnitudes are in latest_sne.dat, Greg says, based on work Robert did earlier.) Richard will tell us how many alignment objects are going to be in STIS fields. We might be able to do a lot of this with STIS snapshots, which isn't so oversubscribed....
Greg hasn't heard any more from Shane. Shane says it takes a long time to run. Right now Shane is doing a different take on what Alex is trying to do, coadding WFPC images, to see how faintly we can see the host. We want to know if we could tell from a snapshot survey whether or not something determines to a halo sample (or "unreddened" sample).
For the other HST proposal (due a week from Friday at 5PM our time), it sounds like we're leaning towards doing 4-5 z=0.8 SNe and 2-3 z=1.3 SNe. There is some discussion over whether we should be treating the butt-z supernovae as more of a pilot study, since the arguement can be made that we need NICMOS (which won't be fixed until mid-2000) to really do it right.
Peter says that Adam says that they have a handful (5?) from Harvard of U-band lightcurves. Only a few, and they aren't great, although they're probably the best ones around. This has gone into a discussion of the rate that these guys are getting from some nearby supernova search they're doing. (I didn't catch the name or telescope.)
Saul wants to know if we have more news about telling rates from the HST data. Greg says he's made catalogs for all of the images, and has started matching them up. He says that he's found 100 or more objects that match at three epochs. ("Wow" seems to be the general comment.) He hasn't yet put it together on something that puts it together nicely. He's still working on merging tricks and so forth to get all of the complete matches. He's surprised by the number of objects. Greg thinks that soon he can write the code to go through and figure out lightcurves and things. He would then also have to write something to figure out if things are varying (most probably won't be, of course).
As a sanity check, Saul wonders if there is a predicted number at these levels from the HDF. Greg expects that there are, but he hasn't been able to try and check them yet. Greg hasn't had much time to do this since the paper's been sucking down all of his time.
Peter asks when the Keck proposal is due... the 16th.
Peter is working mainly on the rise-time paper and the K-correction paper. Nothing shocking right now.
I would like to be involved with that turn-on business.
--Don Groom
(I'll let you decide what he was talking about when he said this to peter.)
Rob switched the database, and not much crashed. He has to check to see if his automatic backup is working. He found an uncleaned run from January, and intends to go back and be a Data Janitor.
Greg wants a nearby search mailing list. Rob says he will take care of it.
Saul says that he suggested to the woman from the BBC that she might want to film the CCD lab. She was also impressed, apparently, with the high-tech look of the supercomputer room. She wants us to have a group meeting in the visualization room....
Don says finally he put other things aside and is hard at it. He spent part of the morning photographing the CCD. He says also that the wafers came back from another implate step, and Steve is today doing mask 8 out of 10.
In two weeks these things are done.
--Don Groom
Then we wait a month for Richard to get back from China to do warm testing of the CCDs. Then more testing and mounting. If they show images, they will be up on Lick for engineering run pretty damn fast.
Then what happens after that?
--P. Nugent
One HELL of a party if they work.
--D. Groom