Skip to content

News

Extrasolar planet transit seen across multiple sites

Nov 27, 2012

WASP-35b, an extrasolar planet located in the constellation Eridanus, was caught transiting by four LCOGT sites simultaneously. The telescopes included a 0.4-meter in Santa Barbara (BPL), the 0.8-meter BOS telescope at Sedgwick Reserve (SQA), and 1-meter telescopes in Texas (ELP) and Chile (LSC).

This was a test to show the capabilities of the network for how a transit may be observed across multiple sites on the network, whether it be at the same time or passing from site to site when the object is setting from one location or when weather is obscuring the sky. The main idea is that observations would be able to pass from site to site and be seamless in the transition. The WASP-35b lightcurve below shows one full transit from BPL with a nearly full one from ELP and partials from LSC and SQA, with data from BPL and LSC being raw and uncalibrated. So while this isn't the cleanest ever light curve, it shows a good start at reaching our goal.