Friday, March 10, 2006

TrES-1 first test successful



I arrived at NMSkies yesterday and did a test on TrES-1 exoplanet transit last night.

The sky was cloudy during the ingress. It cleared later and only the egress could be imaged.

I use the Centurion 18"F2.8 with AP9E CCD and 80 second expsoure. Dark and flat was applied. The S/N on the target stars is about 550.

Attached pls find two images. The first one was using binning of 1 and while one could tell the avergae on the right hand side is about 0.02 mag. higher than the left hand side, for some reason there is too much scattering on the data.

By using extreme binning of 7 to reduce noise (scattering, at the expense of lowered resolution), this 0.02 mag. brightening could be seen easily.

I think next time by lowering the exposure time, I could reduce the data scattering and increase sampling frequency too.