post Calistoga

Project ideas not to drop:

-- high spatial resolution Y-band spectra of luminous ellipticals (Conroy)

-- binary population with Nidever;
   work out giant ages from giant masses in binaries (Gaia & APOGEE)

-- testing PS1 RR Lyrae in dSph in the MW

-- clarify wide-field spectroscopy telescope (Bernstein)

Notes on the "shallow" JWST NIRSPEC survey of 9000 galaxies

Goal: mini-SDSS at z~2-4
Science case: Arjen's ESO large proposal, but now at z~2-4

2 settings R~1000 & R~1000
S/N goal per resolution element 20

Basic targeting m_AB(integrated, @H or IRAC3.6)<24.5; z>2
[and add the ones that are IRAC-only detections…]

according to Tracy Beck: we get ~150 galaxies per MSA setting [CHECK using APT]

thought: 1x 1000 sec @ 1MSA (or 2x500 sec dithered with 2 slits; is that needed)

thought 36 pointings   --> 36x150 galaxies --> 5500 galaxies

Field:  from CANDELS with ALMA access; 2 different fields;
   within a field, contiguous.

  what are the overhead advantages and cosmic variance drawbacks of different
   MSA settings at identical pointing

To be done: what is the S/N distribution, given actual CANDELS size/slitloss parameters.
 any orient constraints: major axis.

Draft needs to be done by May 9

After the Oxberg meeting April 1-2

Two immediate homework's have arisen:

1) Hogg & Price-Wheelan will work through the known streams, and see what
feasable observational data are most potential-constraining; then the plan could be that
Brani organizes a coherent follow-up effort.

2) Discussion between Schönrich, Martig, Binney have arisen that it would be good
to have action-space diffusion coefficients from numerical/cosmological simulations.
Bovy and Roskar have a machinery that takes N-body simulations to an analytic potential
machinery, which then allows the Stäckel fudge, and ultimately to calculate
the actions for a particle with (x,v) in an N-body simulation.
At a practical level, it needs to be cleared-up what these diffusion coefficients
depend on t,R,sigma?

The claim is that with p(J,age,[X/H] | t_now) one can get the diffusion history,
under the assumption of p(J,age,[X/H]) was very narrow at birth.


3) Needs to define paper scope with Nina
4) Need to define paper scope with Marie

getting to the Gaia mock Universe

Some notes on practicalities of getting to the A.Robin (?) mock Gaia Universe.

The basic stuff for my purpose is the gums.mw table,
described in http://dc.zah.uni-heidelberg.de/tableinfo/gums.mw

How to get to it:
what works: go to topcoat (download as needed)
and follow instructions in http://voparis-europlanet.obspm.fr/utilities/Tuto_TopCat.pdf

You don't get the file, but you can SQL-type query it.

You get 1.000.000 records easily, but I still have to figure out how
to get the whole file, e.g. as a binary fits.
Markus Demleitner at ARI is the person to talk to; here is what he advises:

Uncheck "synchronuous"; this selects async operation, which lets
you even change your location and IP and retrieve the result later;
also, it gives you, by default, 3600 seconds of query time before
timing out.

magg<17.5 is still a large number of objects and hence a very large
table (I'd expect several 1e8 rows), probably too big for TOPCAT to
keep in memory or to handle directly (though it might be ready
before the 3600 s timeout).  

You could use STILTS to stream things to your disk and select FITS
binary output (see stilts tapquery); but it'd certainly be preferable
if you gave some additional constraints to offload part of your
computation to the server (note that you can also upload your own
object lists).  The server already has indices in place, quite some
memory, etc., so it usually pays to let it do the heavy lifting and
keep the tables you actually deal with of order 1e6 or maybe 1e7
rows.

I am now working on downloading the fits file directly,

and do them with p. in subdir GaiaSims in Apogee.

Dynamics of K or G dwarfs near the mid-plane

Some thoughts on how to serious is practice about the dynamical modeling
a la Bovy using G and K dwarfs near the galactic mid plane from the SEGUE scans.

1) query all G and K stars with b<30 & spectra in DR10

2) where do we get a/Fe from?

3) get the proper motions both from SDSS and from PS1

4) this is the test-sample on which to compare the two proper motion estimates…

5) do we need to deredden individually?

APOGEE: stellar masses from astroseismology --> ages <--> abundances

Just took a quick look at the fabulous ASCAP results:
they have beautiful masses for a whole bunch of giants with [Fe/H] and
[alpha/Fe] ; they list evolutionary phase and masses;
given the abundances this translates / should translate into ages (e.g. Padova isochrones).

Next time I have a minute, I should just plot t_age = f( [Fe/H], [a/Fe] );
and ask Marc P. why the ages are not explicitly listed.


Some notes (June 2014) after Marie Martig's trials and tribulations:

What we get reliably is:
1) log g; then 2) mass (where Teff comes into the scaling)
we have modest faith in [Fe/H], and something seems screwy with
T_eff (let's get dereddened colors from PS1 or the "amateur survey").

Marie's proposal:
let's rely on log-g and masses only; but even that relationship relies somewhat on
the abundances...

need to discuss age-priors

precision AGN dust torus reverberation mapping with NIRSPEC@JWST IFU

Thoughts during a NIRSPEC IST meeting on possible nearby-galaxy GTO programs in 2019+

The geometry of the dust torus in Seyferts can be mapped by watching the dust response
to accretion disk variations. I got excited about (and learned about) this topic in the
context of Kirsten Schnülle's and J-U Pott's paper (Schnülle et al 2013)
on 5-band monitoring of NGC 4151.

If one considers the 3"x3" IFU with 30x30 0.1"x0.1" pixels and the R=100 grim,
one should get:
 -- wavelength coverage from 0.8 - 5 mum
 -- reproducability and flexibility <1%
 -- very high S/N
 -- very high spatial resolution to subtract stellar body...

Worth a chat with Bernhard D., Kirsten, J-U ..