Related papers: TEST - The Tautenburg Exoplanet Search Telescope

We propose to explore a cascade extreme Adaptive optics (ExAO) approach with a second stage based on a Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS) for exoplanet imaging and spectroscopy. Most exoplanet imagers currently use a single-stage ExAO to…

The DragonCam Microscopic Camera is an instrument being developed for NASA's Dragonfly mission [1] to Saturn's moon Titan. The Microscopic Camera will be body-fixed to the Dragonfly vehicle and will image the surface at a distance of about…

Detection of weak radial velocity shifts of host stars induced by orbiting planets is an important technique for discovering and characterizing planets beyond our solar system. Optical frequency combs enable calibration of stellar radial…

The Roman Space Telescope will be a critical mission to demonstrate high-contrast imaging technologies allowing for the characterisation of exoplanets in reflected light. It will demonstrate $10^{-7}$ contrast limits or better at 3--9…

We describe WHAT, a small-aperture short focal length automated telescope with an 8.2 deg X 8.2 deg field of view, located at the Wise Observatory. The system is aimed at searching for transiting extrasolar planets and variable stars.…

One of the most prolific methods of studying exoplanet atmospheres is transmission spectroscopy, which measures the difference between the depth of an exoplanet's transit signal at various wavelengths and attempts to correlate the depth…

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will devote significant observing time to the study of exoplanets. It will not be serviceable as was the Hubble Space Telescope, and therefore the spacecraft/instruments will have a relatively limited…

By providing sensitive sub-arcsecond images and integral field spectroscopy in the 25 - 400 micron wavelength range, a far-IR interferometer will revolutionize our understanding of planetary system formation, reveal otherwise-undetectable…

Radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial amounts of large telescope time in order to monitor a sufficient number of stars. Two of the aspects which can limit such surveys are the single-object…

In this paper a homomorphic filtering scheme is proposed to improve the estimation of the planet/star radius ratio in astronomical transit signals. The idea is to reduce the effect of the short-term earth atmosphere variations. A two-step…

The fields of astronomy and astrophysics are currently engaged in an unprecedented era of discovery as recent missions have revealed thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars. While the Kepler Space Telescope mission has enabled most of…

A new generation of telescopes with mirror diameters of 20 m or more, called extremely large telescopes (ELTs) has the potential to provide unprecedented imaging and spectroscopy of exo-planetary systems, if the difficulties in achieving…

The Schmidt-Teleskop-Kamera (STK) is a new CCD-imager, which is operated since begin of 2009 at the University Observatory Jena. This article describes the main characteristics of the new camera. The properties of the STK detector, the…

In Spring 2013, the LEECH (LBTI Exozodi Exoplanet Common Hunt) survey began its $\sim$130-night campaign from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) atop Mt Graham, Arizona. This survey benefits from the many technological achievements of the…

We present scope (Simulated CCD Observations for Photometric Experimentation), a Python package to create a forward model of telescope detectors and simulate stellar targets with motion relative to the CCD. The primary application of this…

Traditional searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) or "technosignatures" focus on dedicated observations of single stars or regions in the sky to detect excess or transient emission from intelligent sources. The newest generation…

We report first results from the CHinese Exoplanet Searching Program from Antarctica (CHESPA)---a wide-field high-resolution photometric survey for transiting exoplanets carried out using telescopes of the AST3 (Antarctic Survey Telescopes…

The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) project is a survey for planetary transits of bright stars. It consists of a small-aperture, wide-field automated telescope located at Winer Observatory near Sonoita, Arizona. The telescope…

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright stars with Ic<13. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2018 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission, and is expected to discover a thousand or…

Searching for transits provides a very promising technique for finding close-in extra-solar planets. Transiting planets present the advantage of allowing one to determine physical properties such as mass and radius unambiguously. The…