Exoplanet transit of HD 17156 - New Opportunity

Hi guys

We have another opportunitiy of monitoring an exoplanet transit of HD 17156b. You can see details about this exoplanet on a prevoius posting.

The predicted transit is tomorrow morning (March 19th) at mid centre transit time 03.19hrs.

Our image processing from the previous event discovered calibration problems. This fundamental part of the process has to be solved in order to determine the microvariability at millimag levels. We discovered drifting of the images over the period of 4 hours. If the drifting is above a certain limit MIRA PRO can't handle this processing.

This drifting problem has been solved the other night.

Eamonn A
MPC J62
www.kingslandobservatory.com

Good luck with that lads,

Hope everything goes well.

Hey Eamonn that's great and good luck and you
have at least if nothing else eliminated
one systematic error associated with the set up,
which you can still call a success

Hi guys,

I had a clear night this morning at Kingsland for the transit. I understand that Dave was clouded out at Celbridge.

HD17156b was discovered last year by spectrographic doppler shift method. No one has successfully recorded the full transit event. The transit of HD17156b is estimated to produce a 6.2 + / - 0.4 mmag (“R” band) depth over a mid transit period of ~3 Hours. OOT (Out Of Transit).

This predicted transit of 19th March at ~03h 18m UT follows our observation on 26th Feb based on an orbital period of 21.2 days.

The images were started at 01.00 hrs and finished 05.00 hrs this am.
Exposures were 15 seconds each with a 15 second interval.
I had 500 gigabyte storage added recently in anticipation of a huge download of some 500 images at hi res of binning one.

The major task will be the calibration and photometric processing of the images to millimag tollerances.

We'll keep you all posted.

Eamonn A
MPC J62
www.kingslandobservatory.com

hey Eamonn that's great that you got some clear skies
now comes the hard bit.The Data reduction, what software
are you using again ,im measuring the tangental velocities
of runaway stars im using IRAF (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility) measuring the doppler shift in the spectrum,but it takes quite a bit of callibration.

Hi Dogstar,

I'm using MIRA PRO 7.5 from Mirametrics. This is much easier to use than IRAF for photometry. Regarding spectroscopy, I have dabbled a bit with VisualSpec and AIP4WIN.

Eamonn A
MPC J62
www.kingslandobservatory.com