Easiest way YOU can find exoplanets from home

Mr. Missed Her · 17 Dec 2017 11:45

My only complaint about that EVE program is that they should have made it more obvious that it's real science. When I started doing the Project Discovery, I thought "So, I guess this is supposed to be for discovering planets around stars in EVE."

A-L-E-X · 26 Jan 2018 15:20

Watsisname wrote:
Absolutely! Here's some good info for it.

http://www.britastro.org/vss/EBHandbook11.pdf
https://www.aavso.org/aavso-eclipsing-binary-section
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observin ... ble-stars/

yes you can do it with a mirrorless or dslr camera and do photometry with it, you wont actually see the planet but you can detect its presence

alfa015 · 12 Oct 2018 13:20

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Merged from the "Detect exoplanets by yourself with the cheapest equipment" topic
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Hi guys,

I detected my first exoplanet (hd 189733 b) and made a video about it showing step by step how I did it. I thought it could be useful for the people interested in the topic or already starting with transit photometry.

The star has an apparent magnitude of 7.7 and the exoplanet produces a drop of 2.8% during almost 2 hours.

I used a tele-photo lens (the Pentacon 135 mm f 2.8), a CMOS camera (ZWO ASI 120 MM) and an equatorial mount (Skywatcher EQ3-2)

I also have a dual-axis motor drive, but a simple one that only controls the right ascension would be enough.

I bought most of the items second-hand from Ebay and I spent around 300 euros.

To set up the tele-photo lens and the camera I have a couple of guide rings and in order to focus the tele-photo lens, I have to separate it 33 mm from the camera by using for example 2 M42 extension rings, one of them 28 mm long and the other one 5 mm.

Now, the steps to detect the exoplanet are the following:

1. To find out when is the exoplanet going to transit the star with the Exoplanet Transit Database.

2. With a program called SharpCap, take for example 5-second exposures with a gain of 1 for 3 hours.

3. Once the transit has finished, with a program called ‘AstroImageJ’ open all the images, select the target star and for example a couple of reference stars, and perform multi-aperture photometry to detect the light curve.

I think it is better explained with a video:

alfa015 · 20 Oct 2018 05:25

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Anybody interested ?

astroclu · 26 Oct 2018 09:41

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wow, I haven't tried EVE online and it is funny they kind of included this in the game. Good for educational purposes.
I prefer to use the [url=https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ianc2/exoplanet-explorers]zooniverse project[/url] to do that, and it is a way of doing citizen science

alfa015 · 13 Jul 2019 05:55

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Merged from the "The Habitable Exoplanet Hunting Project" topic
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Hi all!

We are looking for more observatories and amateur astronomers who might want to join the project.

The Habitable Exoplanet Hunting Project is a worldwide network of amateur astronomers searching for new potentially habitable exoplanets. I am coordinating over 20 observatories located in 5 continents.

We are searching for habitable exoplanets around non-flare G, K and M-type stars located within 100 ly.

The stars we are monitoring already have known transiting exoplanets, but none of them are potentially habitable.

We are monitoring each star 24/7 for several months. By doing so, we believe that the chances of finding an exoplanet increase for particular targets.

Moreover, we are focusing on stars closer than 100 light years because, on the one hand, the closest habitable exoplanets will be the first destinations of interstellar missions and, on the other, because very few nearby habitable exoplanets around G and K-type stars have been discovered: only 2 of them.

The number of potentially habitable exoplanets that we could discover is, in theory, around 25. This calculation was obtained by taking into account the number of non-flare stars within 100 light years and the percentage of them that should show transits in the habitable zone.

Each observatory observes the same star and, when the transit of a hypothetical habitable exoplanet becomes unlikely, we move to another star.
Within 100 light years, we only found 10 non-flare G, K and M-type stars with known transiting exoplanets not potentially habitable.

Big telescopes are not necessary, but CCD cameras with a resolution of at least 16 bits are advisable because we are searching for exoplanets that produce a change of brightness in the star of around 0.1%.

If you are interested, feel free to contact me.

More info: https://youtu.be/0A7gEaewOws