Clustering of Very Red Galaxies in the Las Campanas IR Survey

We report results from the first 1000 square arc-minutes of the Las Campanas IR survey. We have imaged 1 square degree of high latitude sky in six distinct fields to a 5-sigma H-band depth of 20.5 (Vega). Optical imaging in the V,R,I,and z' bands allow us to select color subsets and photometric-redshift-defined shells. We show that the angular clustering of faint red galaxies (18 3) is an order of magnitude stronger than that of the complete H-selected field sample. We employ three approaches to estimate $n(z)$ in order to invert w(theta) to derive r_0. We find that our n(z) is well described by a Gaussian with = 1.2, sigma(z) = 0.15. From this we derive a value for r_0 of 7 (+2,-1) co-moving H^{-1} Mpc at = 1.2. This is a factor of ~ 2 larger than the clustering length for Lyman break galaxies and is similar to the expectation for early type galaxies at this epoch.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. To appear in proceedings of the ESO/ECF/STScI workshop "Deep Fields" held in Garching, Germany, 9-12 October 200

CIRPASS: a NIR integral field and multi-object spectrograph

We describe CIRPASS which is currently being completed at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. The optical design is presented and contrasted with more conventional software- suppression designs. The limiting magnitudes on Gemini are expected to be J 22.6 and H 21.7 in a 3 hour exposure

Discovery of the bright trans-Neptunian object 2000 EB173

Discovery of the bright trans-Neptunian object 2000 EB173 (Ferrin, Ignacio; Rabinowitz, David; Deng, Ming; Snyder, J.; Ellman, N.; Vicente, B.; Rengstorf, A.; Depoy, D.; Salim, Samir; Andrews, P.; Bailyn, Charles D.; Baltay, C.; Briceño, César; Coppi, Paolo S.; Schaefer, Bradley E.; Emmet, W.; Oemler, Augustus; Sabbey, Chris N.; Shin, J.; Sofia, Sabatino; van Altena, William F.; Vivas, K.; Abad, C.; Bongiovanni, A.; Bruzual, Gustavo; Della Prugna, F.; Herrera, D.; Magris, Gladis; Mateu, J.; Pacheco, R.; Sánchez, Ge.; Sánchez, Gu.; Schenner, H.; Stock, J.; Vieira, K.; Fuenmayor, F.; Hernández, J.; Naranjo, O.; Rosenzweig, Patricia; Secco, C.; Spavieri, G.; Gebhard, M.; Honeycutt, H.; Mufson, S.; Musser, James A.; Pravdo, Steven H.; Helin, E.; Lawrence, K.) Abstract We describe the discovery circumstances and photometric properties of 2000 EB173, now one of the brightest trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) with opposition magnitude mR=18.9 and also one of the largest Plutinos, found with the drift-scanning camera of the QUEST Collaboration, attached to the 1-m Schmidt telescope of the National Observatory of Venezuela. We measure B - V = 0.99 ± 0.14 and V - R = 0.57 ± 0.05, a red color observed for many fainter TNOs. At our magnitude limit mR = 20.1 ± 0.20, our single detection reveals a sky density of 0.015 (+0.034, -0.012) TNOs per deg2 (the error bars are 68% confidence limits), consistent with fainter surveys showing a cumulative number proportional to 100.5mR. Assuming an inclination distribution of TNOs with FWHM exceeding 30 deg, it is likely that one hundred to several hundred objects brighter than mR=20.1 remain to be [email protected]@[email protected]@[email protected]@[email protected]@[email protected]@[email protected]@ula.ve, [email protected]@[email protected] monográfic