AAS 203rd Meeting, January 2004
Session 17 Extra Solar Planets
Poster, Monday, January 5, 2004, 9:20am-6:30pm, Grand Hall

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[17.06] Extra-Solar Planet Search Using Two 0.1-meter Diameter Telescopes

Y.R. Torres (University of Hawaii, Institute for Astronomy)

The research project my mentor, Dr. Jim Heasley, and I worked on this summer involved a search for extra-solar planets. My research was supported by the National Science Foundation. The search was conducted using a drift scanning method with two 0.1-meter diameter telescopes. By using these small telescopes, we were capable of attaining over 2 million stars per night and over 30 million stars for data analysis. The telescopes are mounted on Haleakala, Maui at an altitude of 10,000 feet.

Our main interest was to detect subtle decreases in the intensity of the measured stars. Sixteen nights of observations were used for our data analysis which covered a range in right ascension from 40 degrees to 200 degrees. For this particular data set, a Stellar Photometry Software package, written by Janes & Heasley (1993), produced information for each star such as the raw instrumental magnitudes, ID numbers, (x,y) coordinates, and an estimated error for each reported magnitude.

In order to flag down these transits and detect time history of any measured object, it was in our best interest to establish a database. The database is useful to us in such a way that large numbers of stars can be stored and examined, we are allowed flexibility in examining the data in a number of ways, and incorporating additional observations as they become available will be much more simplified. The observing program on Haleakala is set to operate for a three year period.


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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
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