Hi guys,
This is a follow up to inform you all as to progress with this challenging exoplanet transit monitoring. The exoplanet HD 17156b was discovered last year.
This has been team work by three of us. Unfortunately, Dave McDonald’s J65 Celbridge observatory was clouded out for this event. Kingsland J62 was lucky it was clear most of the night with some good transparency. Mike Foylan has been keeping us hopping to get observational and processed data. I’m glad the Easter weekend came as I am very tired today after getting to bed again at around 5.00 am. A lot of the work has been in the data processing. Its taken a long time. However, we have got successful transit results of exoplanet HD 17156b
HD 17156b had a predicted mid transit time centre at 03.18 hrs on 19 March, 2008. The transit duration was predicted to be 186 minutes. The sky was clear with a Moon to the south.
The 0.4m SCT on a paramount GT1100S was used with an Apogee AP7p CCD camera with a BB filter. A BB filter is a blue blocking filter. It has advantages over specific UBVRI filters in Moon lit conditions. It also increases the magnitude of the candidate target
About 500 images were taken over the period of 5 hours.
Nearly 200 images were usable and calibrated and processed with MIRA PRO.
The provisional results show that the transit ingress occurred about 4 minutes earlier before the prediction. The dip was shallow on the slope in, but consistent over the predicted period. There were times that there were extra losses due to clouds and dew. Hence eliminating about 300 images.
At this point we have an interesting result. The early ingress doesn’t appear to be an anomaly. It could be due to a second planet ‘c’ in conjunction with ‘b’. We'll keep you informed as this unravels.
Eamonn A
MPC J62
www.kingslandobservatory.com
