Located within 10 degrees of the North Pole, northern Ellesmere Island offers continuous darkness in the winter months. This capability can greatly enhance the detection efficiency of planetary transit surveys and other time domain astronomy programs. We deployed two wide-field cameras at 80 • N, near Eureka, Nunavut, for a 152-hour observing campaign in February 2012. The 16-megapixel-camera systems were based on commercial f/1.2 lenses with 70mm and 42mm apertures, and they continuously imaged 504 and 1,295 square degrees respectively. In total, the cameras took over 44,000 images and produced better-than-1% precision light curves for approximately 10,000 stars. We describe a new high-speed astrometric and photometric data reduction pipeline designed for the systems, test several methods for the precision flat-fielding of images from very-wide-angle cameras, and evaluate the cameras' image qualities. We achieved a scintillation-limited photometric precision of 1-2% in each 10s exposure. Binning the short exposures into 10-min chunks provided a photometric stability of 2-3 millimagnitudes, sufficient for the detection of transiting exoplanets around the bright stars targeted by our survey. We estimate that the cameras, when operated over the full arctic winter, will be capable of discovering several transiting exoplanets around bright (m V < 9.5) stars. 1
Non-spherical explosions develop non-radial flows as the pattern of shock emergence progresses across the stellar surface. In supernovae these flows can limit ejecta speeds, stifle shock breakout emission, and cause collisions outside the star. Similar phenomena occur in stellar and planetary collisions, tidal disruption events, accretion-induced collapses, and propagating detonations. We present two-dimensional, nested-grid Athena simulations of non-radial shock emergence in a frame comoving with the breakout pattern, focusing on the adiabatic, non-relativistic limit in a plane stratified envelope. We set boundary conditions using a known self-similar solution and explore the role of box size and resolution on the result. The shock front curves toward the stellar surface, and exhibits a kink from which weak discontinuities originate. Flow around the point of shock emergence is neither perfectly steady nor self-similar. Waves and vortices, which are not predominantly due to grid effects, emanate from this region. The post-shock flow is deflected along the stellar surface, and its pressure disturbs the stellar atmosphere upstream of the emerging shock. We use the numerical results and their analytical limits to predict the effects of radiation transfer and gravity, which are not included in our simulations.
Observations from near the Eureka station on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic at 80• North, benefit from 24-hour darkness combined with dark skies and long cloud-free periods during the winter. Our first astronomical surveys conducted at the site are aimed at transiting exoplanets; compared to mid-latitude sites, the continuous darkness during the Arctic winter greatly improves the survey's detection efficiency for longer-period transiting planets. We detail the design, construction, and testing of the first two instruments: a robotic telescope, and a set of very wide-field imaging cameras. The 0.5m Dunlap Institute Arctic Telescope has a 0.8-square-degree field of view and is designed to search for potentially habitable exoplanets around low-mass stars. The very wide field cameras have several-hundred-square-degree fields of view pointed at Polaris, are designed to search for transiting planets around bright stars, and were tested at the site in February 2012. Finally, we present a conceptual design for the Compound Arctic Telescope Survey (CATS), a multiplexed transient and transit search system which can produce a 10,000-square-degree snapshot image every few minutes throughout the Arctic winter.
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