Visiting some old friends...

There are potentially 10 nights of AAT time to prove that the new AAOmega instrument can make a significant detection of the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs, a.k.a. the "baryon wiggles" or "the baryon bump"). But just how?? GALEX selected Emission line galaxies at z~1 or the more biased LRGs at z~0.8?? Both?? Either?? And how do you run a pilot? What is the best strategy? What is your philosophy?

All these questions will be answered (well apart from the possibly the last one of two) in the near future. Field selection continues apace. I/we now have a better and better idea to which fields we're gonna go after and why. COSMOS, S11, UKIDSS LAS and some ol' friends here we come!!

Potentially couple of interesting papers on astro-ph today. Ilbert et al. astro-ph/060232 on the "environment" dependence evolution of the Luminosity function from VVDS and my current hobby-horse, progenitors of LRGs and early-types, which Kaviraj et al. (astro-ph/0602329) have been modelling and find that "averaging across all environments at z~1, less than 50 percent of the stellar mass which ends up in early-types today is actually in early-type progenitors at this redshift". What exactly this means/implies I'll have to think about!

Oz-minus 9 days and counting.