Reason One

I think the reason I decided to start NPRs Research today was (unsurprisingly) one of Hogg's (NYU) posts. I wrote, with old fashioned but still extremely useful pen and paper, in my log book about a week or so about merger rates of galaxies. Specifically, it looks as if we're beginning to get a handle/upper limit on LRG-LRG merger rates from the recent papers by Masjedi (NYU)
and Wake (Durham). We also think we know about the build-up of "regular" Red Sequence galaxies from z~1 from say the COMBO-17 (Bell, MPIA). And I had a very similar thought, that surely what we would really like to know now is the rate at which the really massive galaxies (i.e
the LRGs) merge with the regular red galaxies. I don't know exactly why but surely this number is pretty important. I will work this out at some point, once I get a break from configuring AAOmega fields.....

Learnt something new today (LSNT): Relative astrometry is fairly easy. Absolute astrometry is hard.