Related papers: Exoplanets from the Arctic: The First Wide-Field S…

Observations from near the Eureka station on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic at 80 degrees North, benefit from 24-hour darkness combined with dark skies and long cloud-free periods during the winter. Our first astronomical…

Ellesmere Island, at the most northerly tip of Canada, possesses the highest mountain peaks within 10 degrees of the pole. The highest is 2616 m, with many summits over 1000 m, high enough to place them above a stable low-elevation thermal…

ASTEP South is the first phase of the ASTEP project (Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets). The instrument is a fixed 10 cm refractor with a 4kx4k CCD camera in a thermalized box, pointing continuously a 3.88 degree x 3.88 degree…

Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…

Dome C in Antarctica is a promising site for photometric observations thanks to the continuous night during the Antarctic winter and favorable weather conditions. We developed instruments to assess the quality of this site for photometry in…

Well over 700 exoplanets have been detected to date. Only a handful of these have been observed directly. Direct observation is extremely challenging due to the small separation and very large contrast involved. Imaging polarimetry offers a…

This paper describes the design, operations, and performance of the Multi-site All-Sky CAmeRA (MASCARA). Its primary goal is to find new exoplanets transiting bright stars, $4 < m_V < 8$, by monitoring the full sky. MASCARA consists of one…

We present the first measurements of the near-infrared (NIR), specifically the J-band, sky background in the Canadian High Arctic. There has been considerable recent interest in the development of an astronomical observatory in Ellesmere…

We report the results of a prototype photometric search for transiting extrasolar planets using Subaru Suprime-Cam. Out of about 100,000 stars monitored around the Galactic plane (l=90 degree,b=0 degree), we find that 7,700 (27,000) stars…

Near-IR observations are important for the detection and characterization of exoplanets using the transit technique, either in surveys of large numbers of stars or for follow-up spectroscopic observations of individual planets. In a…

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…

We report the latest results of 225 GHz atmospheric opacity measurements from two arctic sites; one on high coastal terrain near the Eureka weather station, on Ellesmere Island, Canada, and the other at the Summit Station near the peak of…

We report results of a two-year campaign of measurements, during arctic winter darkness, of optical turbulence in the atmospheric boundary-layer above the Polar Environment Atmospheric Laboratory in northern Ellesmere Island (latitude +80…

ASTEP (Antarctica Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) is a pilot project that aims at searching and characterizing transiting exoplanets from Dome C in Antarctica and to qualify this site for photometry in the visible. Two instruments were…

Nighttime zenith sky spectral brightness in the 3.3 to 20 micron wavelength region is reported for an observatory site nearby Eureka, on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic. Measurements derive from an automated Fourier-transform…

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 XO project aims at detecting transiting exoplanets around bright stars from the ground using small telescopes. The original configuration of XO (McCullough et al. 2005) has been changed and extended as described here. The instrumental…

We report the first extrasolar planet observations from the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), currently the world's largest, fully steerable, single-aperture optical telescope. We used the OSIRIS tunable filter imager on the GTC to…

Dome A on the Antarctic plateau is likely one of the best observing sites on Earth thanks to the excellent atmospheric conditions present at the site during the long polar winter night. We present high-cadence time-series aperture…

We have carried out photometric follow-up observations of bright transiting extrasolar planets using the CbNUOJ 0.6m telescope. We have tested the possibility of obtaining high photometric precision by applying the telescope defocus…