I'm not going to go into the history of exoplanets in this post (but will say we started finding new planets before poor Pluto was demoted). Instead, I'm going to list out some resources I've found helpful and or interesting over the years as I've tried to become more proficient at making exoplanet observations. Yes! You can observe other worlds from your own backyard. It's both easier and more challenging than one might think...but that too is a topic for many future posts.
Here is a list of resources for those interested in observing exoplanets:
This is currently my favorite. The site's design is showing its clunkiness as the number of transiting exoplanets steadily increases. Keep in mind it's a site run by an amateur club and they're doing an excellent job of collecting amateur observations and keeping up with new information as it comes in.
This is a great site to visit to plan out an observing session. Enter your latitude/longitude and you can view a list of predicted transits as well as important information to help you plan an observing session. Very helpful when trying to find an event in your viewable sky during your observing window. There are also tools to model fit your data and cool plots and diagrams of your results.
I have many observations listed here. My son also has a few. I would encourage everyone who has made transit observations to submit them to this site. The data is open to all for study and if your data is used for publication you will receive credit.
There is a wealth of exoplanet information here! It's fun to mine through the data and marvel at the amount of effort that went into acquiring, analyzing and presenting it. As far as I'm aware, this archive does not take amateur submissions. However, where the Exoplanet Transit Database only contains exoplanets that transit their host stars, the NASA archive contains information on exoplanets found by ANY method. There's data on exoplanets found by imaging (very few!!), radial velocity and micro-lensing as well as well as transiting. There's even a few discovered by transit time variance. Basically, if it's thought to be an exoplanet, it's in there!
For a number of years Bruce Gary maintained this site to collect amateur observations and to provide helpful research information on technique. The site is currently closed to new submissions and point to the Exoplanet Transit Database as the preferred place to submit your observations. The site does still contain a wealth of information on technique that anyone wanting to observe exoplanets should read. Bruce has written a book called Exoplanet Observing for Amateurs on the subject which you can still find in printed form or you can get the PDF.
If one does any astronomical observing of any kind, one should visit Cloudy Nights! It's a great place to hang out on...well...cloudy nights. I find rainy days work well also. Lots of forums with tons of great people offering helpful advice on everything and anything astronomy related. Looking to buy a new scope, asky these guys what they think! Trying to image...well, there are some darn good images there! And lots of folk who aren't good images but are willing to show off what they can do which provides a very real look into the learning process and what you can expect trying to do the same.
It's great if you can learn from your own mistakes, it's more convenient if you can learn from other peoples mistakes...and this is what I like best about Cloudy Nights! To be fair, I've posted many of my own mistakes to help others learn as well.
There's not a specific form for exoplanets, but the Variable Star and Radio Astronomy forum tends to be where us science geeks hang out. Many of the techniques for measuring exoplanet transits are similar to other photometric pursuits so there is some crossover with variable star observing. The important thing is to ask questions and decide for yourself just how much the answers apply to your specific situation.
It's getting dark enough now I can hopefully finish setting up an Orion 80 on my CPC1100. I'm hoping to try something new tonight...going to try and measure the transit of Kepler-10b with both the piggyback refractor and the CPC simultaneously...maybe we'll talk about that experience in the next post...
No comments:
Post a Comment