[I missed a few days on travel.]
On Thursday, Burles, Bolton, and I had a data analysis pow-wow at MIT. We are facing some crazy data for the PRIMUS project and they are not yet tamed. Burles feels that a lot of the problem is fitting the sky through the slits, with non-zero instrument resolution, and then tracing and extracting the object spectra from the two-dimensional spectral images. I hope so, but it is going to take some real work to do it right.
Today, Moustakas gave a nice overview at lunch (on the blackboard) of the fundamental observables in galaxy evolution: luminosities, colors, and emission line strengths. All of these are just measurements of the spectral energy distribution with different levels of crudeness, but they are differently sensitive to age, star-formation history, dust, and chemical composition, all of which are themselves inter-related. To figure out how galaxies form, and how stars form within galaxies, a consistent picture must be drawn for all these observables, that is also consistent with what we know (and we know a lot) about the dark sector.
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