Over at Steinn's place, we're all a twitter anticipating the number of Hubble Space Telescope proposals submitted this Cycle. Fancy new instruments and shiny bad-ass spectrographs coming to the telescope, so interest should be high. Based on comments, here's proposal number versus time until deadline. I'll add any late breaking data to the plot -- post submission times (PST, preferrably, because math iz hard) in comments here or at Steinn's, and I'll add them as I can.
Apparently this is a nice exponential, so my prediction is that we'll have an infinite number of proposals this round. Update: No! Flattening off! We may not even break 1000, which is a shock! Highest number so far is 928 at 10 minutes until the deadline. Extrapolated fit uses the most recent decade in time. Any procrastinators out there have something higher? Post-Mortem: While cracking some beers with my group at 5:05 PST, we talked with a student who had submitted a STIS proposal. Apparently the spectroscopic ETC (exposure time calculator) was all kinds of crazy, so I'm betting that cut down on the number of proposals one could just whip out for COS or STIS. The imaging ETC worked just great (or at least, it lied convincingly). I also agree with Steinn that a lot of people decided to sit this one out, since there were of course going to be 2000 proposals (the same way that the number of proposals went up after the ACS failure, since of course no one was going to be asking for time on WFPC2 and NICMOS). Apparently you'd make a killing placing short sales on HST proposal betting.
