Related papers: Astronomy with Small Telescopes
Short-period super-Earths and Neptunes are now known to be very frequent around solar-type stars. Improving our understanding of these mysterious planets requires the detection of a significant sample of objects suitable for detailed…
We present a technique for verifying or refuting exoplanet candidates from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission by searching for nearby eclipsing binary stars using higher-resolution archival images from ground-based…
We are setting up a new search for transiting extrasolar planets using the 0.5m Automated Patrol Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, Australia. We will begin regular observations in September 2002. We expect to find ~7 new planets per…
The vast majority of known extrasolar planets orbit stars with a narrow range of masses (0.7-1.3 M_sun). Recent years have seen rapid growth in our knowledge about the properties of planetary systems with host stars significantly more…
The Tsinghua University-National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) Transient Survey (TNTS) is an automatic survey for a systematic exploration of optical transients (OTs), conducted with a 60/90 cm Schmidt telescope at Xinglong…
The highly successful SuperWASP planetary transit finding programme has surveyed a large fraction of both the northern and southern skies. There now exists in the its archive over 420 billion photometric measurements for more than 31…
Unlike hot Jupiters or other gas giants, super-Earths are expected to have a wide variety of compositions, ranging from terrestrial bodies like our own to more gaseous planets like Neptune. Observations of transiting systems, which allow us…
We discuss preliminary results from our first search campaign for transiting planets performed using Sleuth, an automated 10 cm telescope with a 6 degree square field of view. We monitored a field in Hercules for 40 clear nights between UT…
We present 31 bright eclipsing contact and semi-detached binaries that showed high period change rates in a 5 year interval in observations by the All-Sky Automated Survey (ASAS). The time-scales of these changes range from only 50 up to…
The DEEP-South photometric census of small Solar System bodies produces massive time-series data of variable, transient or moving objects as a by-product. To fully investigate unexplored variable phenomena, we present an application of…
High contrast imaging searches for exoplanets have been conducted on 2.4-10 m telescopes, typically at H band (1.6 microns) and used exposure times of ~1 hr to search for planets with semi-major axes of > ~10 AU. We are beginning to plan…
As new large-scale astronomical surveys greatly increase the number of objects targeted and discoveries made, the requirement for efficient follow-up observations is crucial. Adaptive optics imaging, which compensates for the image-blurring…
With JWST's successful deployment and unexpectedly high fuel reserves, measuring the masses of sub-Neptunes transiting bright, nearby stars will soon become the bottleneck for characterizing the atmospheres of small exoplanets via…
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…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has a goal of detecting small planets orbiting stars bright enough for mass determination via ground-based radial velocity observations. Here we present estimates of how many exoplanets the…
OGLE and ASAS are long term observing projects operated by the Warsaw University Observatory at the Las Campanas site in Chile. OGLE is currently monitoring almost 200 million stars in the Galactic Bulge and the Magellanic Clouds, and has…
The forthcoming launch of the Ultraviolet Transient Astronomy Satellite (ULTRASAT) will transform our understanding of the transient ultraviolet sky by increasing our ability to identify transients due to its unprecedented 204 deg2 field of…
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to detect serendipitous occultations of stars by small (about 1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (<0.001 events per star per year) and short…
I provide an incomplete inventory of the astronomical variability that will be found by next-generation time-domain astronomical surveys. These phenomena span the distance range from near-Earth satellites to the farthest Gamma Ray Bursts.…
The observation of gaseous giant planets is of high scientific interest. Although they have been the targets of several spacecraft missions, there still remains a need for continuous ground-based observations. As their atmospheres present…