Exploring Exoplanets: Detecting Transits with the RASC Robotic Telescope
Anyone with a Windows, Mac or Linux computer can learn how to image and analyze exoplanet transits in our newest course! Join us Wednesday nights from August 4 to September 1 to learn what makes a good exoplanet for us to image, image it and then find the exoplanet in the data. We'll even show you how to take the skills you learn and apply it to data provided by researchers. Become a citizen exoplanet hunter today!
All sessions will be recorded and made available for course attendees afterwards.
Course host: Jenna Hinds
Course dates: Wednesdays from August 4th to September 1st, 7:00 - 8:30pm EDT (with one session later in the evening)
Cost: $50 per person, maximum 30 people
Registration is now closed.
What do you need?
- A computer running Windows, Mac OS or Linux and with at least 4MB of RAM
- The ability to download and store up to 1GB of data
- AstroImageJ installed on your computer (instructions and downloads available here)
What will you learn?
Over the five week course, you'll learn about exoplanets and how we've detected them in the past. We'll show you how to find exoplanets to image from anywhere in the world and how to program a telescope to image them. You can help us decide which transit to image with our own scope! Join us for a late-night session to watch the telescope in action and maybe take some fun extra photos as well. Finally, we'll send you the data from our chosen exoplanet and process it with you.
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Date |
Session |
|---|---|
|
August 4, 2021 |
All About Exoplanets In our first session, we will go over what exoplanets actually are, how they have historically been detected and how we will be detecting them using the RASC Robotic Telescope. We'll go over knowing the limitations of the telescope you are using and how to choose a good exoplanet for your setup. |
|
August 11, 2021 |
Choosing Our Exoplanet Today we will go through how to choose our exoplanet for this course. We'll look at all the factors that make an exoplanet transit a "good" candidate, including brightness of the host star, size of the exoplanet itself and how much of the transit we can see from our location. We'll look through available exoplanet transits for tonight and next week and you can choose which one you would like us to image. Finally, we'll show you how to program the telescope to image the transit we choose. |
|
August 11 or 18, 2021 |
Imaging Our Exoplanet Tonight's the night! We will image an exoplanet of your choosing this week, which means that our meeting will be a bit later than usual. We'll show you how the telescope works, take a look at some fun targets and get our imaging run going. The next day, we'll send you the raw data from the run! |
|
August 25, 2021 |
Prepping the Data Today we have a task that some may find a bit tedious but is very important to ensure we can actually detect the exoplanet transit. We need to calibrate, align and stabilize the data to make sure the computer can do its job of analysis in our next step. We'll go over the types of calibration frames and what we need to do with them in this session. If you have any trouble with calibration, we will send you our final calibrated, stabilized and aligned data so you can still join us in the last step. |
|
September 1, 2021 |
Finding our Exoplanet We made it to our final and most exciting step! We'll be measuring the brightness of the host star to see if we can find a dip in brightness when the exoplanet passed in front of its star. Once we have that measurement, we'll show you how to submit results to scientific organizations so that our work can be used to more accurately predict exoplanet transits in the future. We'll also go over other work you can do with this newfound skill set. |