Known exoplanets not only provide excellent targets for students who are learning to acquire data with remote observatories and to process the data but also fulfill a scientific need for repeated measurements to determine the stability of known parameters. We present recent measurements taken by undergraduate students with a remotely accessed telescope at the Dark Skies Observatory Collaborative in West Texas on two well-studied exoplanets. WASP 43b has a published orbital period of 0.81347753 days and its host K7V star has a visual magnitude of 12.4. HD 189733b has a published orbital period of 2.21857312 days around its K1V star of visual magnitude 7.67. Both planets orbit within the corona of their host stars and, as such, appear to experience changes in their orbital periods, transit timings, and other parameters. We examined the historical trends, combined them with our measurements in the mid-transit timings for the stars, and determined there are significant changes. Astronomersfrom college students to professionals-need this continued monitoring in order to keep system models up to date.
The Small Telescope Extrasolar Transit Search (STExTS) project involves undergraduates in research using ground-based small aperture, wide-angle telescopes to search for hot Jupitersize transiting exoplanets of stars down to 13th magnitude. The observational campaigns in 2015 and 2016 used the Monroe Observatory of the University of North Texas with a f/1.5 152 mm astrograph installed for remote observing and in 2017 twin f/1.25 152 mm astrographs were remotely accessed at the Dark Sky Observatory Collective (DSOC) near Ft. Davis, TX. Hardware and the use of commercial software for remote operation of the telescope and camera were installed and coordinated by the team. Observational campaigns usually run 25 to 35 nights, capturing 5000+ stars per image, 250 images per night of the same region of the sky. A software processing pipeline and SQL database were created for the searches. The pipeline examines the images, calibrates them, extracts the stars, and matches each star with an astronomical catalog of stars for identification. Finally photometric analysis is performed to measure the light curve of every star, the results of which are stored in the project SQL database hosted by the University of Dallas. PERANSO and VARTOOLs are used to analyze the light curve and to identify stars of interest. The process of converting the astrograph to remote use, the development of the data pipeline, the role of student researchers, and a new exoplanet candidate, GSC 2087-1126 b, are presented.
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