massive spectroscopy

I discussed with Burles target selection for the prism-spectroscopy project of Burles, Coil, and Eisenstein. Evidently he is leaning towards the COSMOS survey field, with deep, one-band HST/ACS imaging. We discussed object detection that could take place in the raw frames; ie, without stacking the images. We also discussed slit placement and observing strategy. If fringing can be represented always as additive functions in a restricted range of spatial scales on the detector, it might be possible to estimate it on every source, and then the observing strategy called nod-and-shuffle (which restricts the slit lengths to be long and increases the noise) might not be necessary.