all my stuff

Been busy today. Finished redshifting the "major" LRG fields (COSMOS, delta05 and the two S11 selections) and then proceded to make riz plots of my >1300 objects that I can match and have colours for. Then broke the sample down into redshift bins and (sadly) couldn't see any major trends with redshift. However, more investigation is needed and this is all going in my COMBO-17/colour selection paper and thesis!!

Lunchtime talks today were by Davies and Baugh. Davies talked about the colour/density relationship at z~1 from DEEP2 and VVDS and how the results from the different surveys do in his opinion (and might in mine) conflict. The Cooper et al. paper (astro ph/0603177) is definitely worth a read. Then we moved onto all the jazz from Huetsi (astro ph/0512201 and 0603177). Well, I knew *someone* had to be doing this but someone from outside the Sloan? As such, the SDSS geometry is incredibly complex for this type of analysis and Baugh made some comments online about several things the papers didn't really address (selection functions, details of P(k) comparisons etc.) . Anyway, very interesting as it was all my stuff and was quite vocal during the talks as a result!

Finally had a good chat with Norberg (Edinburgh) about his recent work on the 2QZ correlation function, its evolution and most over, ERRORS!! The differences, pros and cons of errors from mock catalogues, jackknifes and bootstrap. He's been looking at errors on the errors (!!) and the ol' Frequentist vs. Bayesian approaches.

structure at z~5

Wednesday, Bristol.

Flew down to Bristol for a Postdoc interview. What a great city - very like Edinburgh and most probably has more hours of sunshine. Really picked up a good vibe from the place and after chatting to Bremer, Douglas, Lancaster and Phillips (all Bristol) could see myself settling in and working on some pretty cool stuff.

This pretty cool stuff would be high redshift galaxies (z~5 and higher) who are (potentially) sitting in haloes of order 10^12 M_solar and have masses themselves of 10^9 M_solar. Also when we got chatting in the interview, Bremer mentioned that they have evidence for structure at these redshits. How cool is that?!?! And what does it mean?!?! I know I mentioned a couple of days ago (totally coincedentally) about what you'd need to do a z~6 survey - but hey - it might already be here!!

Okay, have to go, a Gigantus Bumblebeeus has just flown into my office and "buzzed" me....

more redshifting

This morning was spent continuing redshifting the AAOmega data. I've now done two fields (Cosmos "Vanilla One" and S11 with the z-band < 20.2 selection) and suffice to say not only do we have a mini-LRG survey, we also have a fine M-star survey!

This afternoon was spent on my paper - yay!! The intro is re-written and actually reads pretty well now. At times I think there's a lot more to do but then realise also how much I've done already. Will have to still do 3-power-law models and the like for Shanks but am getting there.

Left early as had to pick up and get a wee bit sorted for Bristol tomorrow. Looking forward to it - if not the V. early start!

diversifying

Due to tedious jobs (dry cleaning, passport renewal), supervisor observing ("Shanks and Bielby do America") and 5s (Get in Cosmic!!) today was very slow to get going, ahem.

Anyway, doing the AAOmega redshifting "properly" now. That's not to say we didn't before, but this time, I'm going through every single data object to redshift them, spot OII, spot any [Ne V], the k+a's for Roseboom (UQ) and anything else that might look interesting. Also want to see really how bad the "fringing" was affecting things. Looks like we're gonna have a nice M-star survey at this rate.

When my lunch wasn't interuppted*, I read the Madua paper on astro-ph today (0604448). I'm now understand more about the ol' extragalactic light background (ELB) but am even more confused about the H.E.S.S. findings that Brown (Durham) talked about at the NAM. Even though I wont admitted it to him directly, I think H.E.S.S. is doing a great job which means these discrepancies, if they exist are puzzling.

*Even after I put up the note on the door to discourage people coming to see me, I was distubed not once, but twice today while eating my Coronation chicken rol!! Nobodies fault but my own I guess...

loyal readers

Dear Loyal Readers,

Just a Big Shout Out to those that read NPRs Research on a regular basis. You know who you are and Thank you.

Been thinking a lot recently about the CMB (surprise, surprise) after really enjoying Land's (Imperial) talk at the Challenges to Cosmology session at the NAM. Looks like there is some sort of "Axis of Evil" thing going on but the low dipole moment I personally doubt has a cosmological origin. Land already has a nice set of papers walking you through various statistical analyses and models, e.g. Bianchi Type VIIh and their ability (and short-comings) in explaining the AoE.

What else? Was still persuing my fanciful EROs and wondering what happened to the angular correlation analysis I helped Swinbank (Durham) do on some early WFCAM data. Should follow this up....

star-galaxy separation

The 2-page technical report update for the AAOmega LRG BAO project has been submitted. We (Shanks, Wake, Bielby, da Angela and I in Durham and Cannon and Croom at the AAO) didn't do too much more on it this morning. We'll just have to wait and see. I was chuffed that I figured out a better way to do the star-galaxy separation but this ultimately didn't go in.

Also felt chuffed that I came up with an idea for the upcoming Kitt Peak 3-night run that Shanks and Bielby are off tae (a "free" week!!) which would include getting B~23 mag objects to do B-K >5 objects using the UKIDSS LAS.

Also have been thinking about what kinda hardware etc. you'd need for a "proper" z~6 galaxy survey...

You can do 2SLAQ in an hour.

But what "killer" graph can we put in the technical report at the 11th hour that'll wow the AATAC?!

Also a trio of astro-ph papers today on the ol' BAOs. A deuce from Eisenstein (Arizona) et al. themselves!

AAOmega technical report

Continued analysing the AAOmega data using both my Zcoding experience and Cannon's (AAO). I don't really see that much between them. Did the S11 field (repeatedly for 1, 2 and 3 hrs!) and now have a fairly complete .rz fileset. From this we'll have to pick out interesting and/or good quality spectra.

Produced a riz colour-colour plot for our AAOmega LRG data. Couldn't readily spot a colour trend with redshift though will look into this more tomorrow. Would be nice to make my "old 'n' simple" r-i cut select a mean redshift z~0.7 sample.

Solid days work

Wow it was nice a quiet a work today (hardly surprising, Nic).

Made several graphs for the d05, S11 and COSMOS fibres 200-299 data. Was only working on the 2 hour exposures (hopefully get 1-hour S11 tomorrow). For some, still unknown reason, my completeness figures for d05 are still down on Cannon's (AAO) even though I should have better S/N from a longer combined exposure. Bottom line: i <19.8 mean z = 0.56 (2SLAQ); 19.8 < i <20.5 mean z = 0.65; z <20.2 mean z = 0.69.

Gonna get hectic again tomorrow!

So much for "weekly" posts

Dear all,

Very sorry for the lack of posts to NPRs Research blog as of late.

This has a bit to do with the lack of NPRs research, much more to do with a fairly hectic week at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Leicester, a sniffling to do with me picking up a cold and also Easter.

I re-assure all loyal reader(s) that things shall be back hopefully track back to a normal, weekday service, as of Monday.

As always, if you have been thank you for listening.

Yours,
Nic