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B. C. Lee, G. Aldering, C. Aragon, S. Bailey, S. Bongard, D. Kocevski, S. Loken, P. Nugent, S. Perlmutter, R. Scalzo, R. C. Thomas, L. Wang, B. A. Weaver (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA), P. Antilogus, S. Gilles, R. Pain, R. Pereira (Laboratoire de Physique Nucleaire et de Haute Energies de Paris), N. Blanc, Y. Copin, E. Gangler, L. Sauge, G. Smadja (Institut de Physique Nucleaire de Lyon), C. Bonnaud, E. Pecontal (Centre de Recherche Astronomique de Lyon), R. Kessler (Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, Chicago, IL), C. Baltay, D. Rabinowitz, A. Bauer (Yale), Nearby Supernova Factory Collaboration
The Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) is a project to discover and study a large sample of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) in the redshift range 0.03 < z < 0.08. The SNfactory will obtain a uniform high-quality dataset of flux-calibrated optical spectra at 10-15 epochs, every few days starting 5-15 days before maximum light, for each SNe Ia. Supernova candidates are found by searching wide-field imaging data from the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) project at JPL, and from the Palomar Consortium (Yale/JPL/Caltech) (see Scalzo et al. poster). Follow-up observations are performed with the Supernova Integral Field Spectrograph (SNIFS), a novel instrument optimized for SNe studies, installed on the University of Hawaii 2.2-meter telescope on Mauna Kea. The SNIFS integral field spectroscopy addresses the vexing problem of separating SN and host galaxy spectra, while the spectrophotmetric data can be used to simultaneously study the evolution of SN spectral features and synthesize SN light curves for any filter in the broad 320-1000 nm bandpass (UBVRI, ugriz, etc.). The SNfactory dataset will thus dramatically improve our understanding of the physics of SNe Ia and reduce the uncertainties in their use as cosmological standard candles. SNIFS observations have been conducted remotely from the United States and France since June 2004, with increasing emphasis on scripting and automation for greater efficiency. This poster will review the current state of SNfactory spectroscopic data acquisition and remote observing operations.
Support for SNfactory is provided in the United States by the DOE Office of Science, the National Science Foundation through the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and in France by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) through the Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3), the Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers (INSU) and the Programme National de Cosmologie (PNC).
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://snfactory.lbl.gov/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: bclee@lbl.gov
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #4
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.