* Astronomy

Members Login
Username 
 
Password 
    Remember Me  
Post Info TOPIC: Ellesmere telescope


L

Posts: 131433
Date:
Ellesmere Island telescope
Permalink  
 


Title: Exoplanets from the Arctic: The First Wide-Field Survey at 80 Degrees North
Authors: Nicholas M. Law, Raymond Carlberg, Pegah Salbi, Wai-Hin Wayne Ngan, Aida Ahmadi, Eric Steinbring, Richard Murowinski, Suresh Sivanandam, Wolfgang Kerzendorf

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 degrees North, 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 (V<9) stars.

Read more (2875kb, PDF)



__________________


L

Posts: 131433
Date:
Ellesmere telescope
Permalink  
 


An enterprising team of astronomers is set to lug a telescope to the High Arctic, lubricate it with special low temperature grease and set up shop on Ellesmere Island.
They say the island - the last big chunk of land before the North Pole - looks like it could be the best place on Earth to see the universe.

Read more



__________________
Page 1 of 1  sorted by
 
Quick Reply

Please log in to post quick replies.



Create your own FREE Forum
Report Abuse
Powered by ActiveBoard