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Post Info TOPIC: Exoplanet Transits
Blobrana


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RE: Exoplanet Transits
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Transiting exoplanets

In the quest to find life elsewhere in the universe, planetary scientists have detected more than 500 planets outside the solar system, or exoplanets, over the past 15 years. About one-fifth of those were discovered by scanning the sky for any change in a star's brightness that might be caused by a planet passing in front of that star as seen from Earth.
Known as a transit, this event is essentially an eclipse, but instead of blocking an entire celestial body from view, as the Moon does to the sun during a solar eclipse, a transiting planet obscures just a tiny fraction of the light from its parent star. Astronomers use ground-based telescopes to detect these tiny fractions - changes as small as 0.25 percent. Then they try to confirm a planet's existence through careful follow-up observations.



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Blobrana


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Title: Observing Exoplanet Transits with Digital SLR Cameras
Authors: Colin Littlefield

Using a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera, I observed a transit of exoplanet HD 189733 in order to determine the feasibility of using these types of cameras for high-precision photometry. The results were scientifically useful, showing that even though the camera is not explicitly designed for scientific applications, it can nevertheless produce high-quality differential photometry.

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