PlanetQuest Telescopes

Southern Hemisphere

The Anglo-Australian and UK Schmidt telescopes, Siding Spring Observatory. Image © AAO.

Siding Spring Observatory, Australia

From mid-June 2005 until mid-July 2005 we observed at Siding Spring using the 1-meter telescope to study a method of detecting planets around eclipsing binary stars in the Galactic Center. The data have been reduced to light curves awaiting searches by PlanetQuesters for evidence of planetary transits.

http://www.aao.gov.au/

Vulcan South, Antarctica

The SETI optical telescope and the AASTO service building backlit by aurora. © J. Dana Hrubes, 2004.

PlanetQuest president and astrophysicist Laurance Doyle is a coinvestigator with principal investigator Doug Caldwell on the Vulcan South project at the Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation for the first three years, the Vulcan South project seeks to take advantage of the unique conditions at the South Pole to carry out a more efficient and more sensitive transit search than is possible from any other single site on Earth.

A stormy summer day at the South Pole. © Douglas Caldwell, Vulcan South Project.

The Vulcan South project seeks to improve our understanding of hot-Jupiters (giant close-in exo-planets) by discovering enough of them to allow us to draw statistically significant conclusions about their formation, composition, and evolution. The unique conditions at the South Pole allow the Vulcan South team to carry out a more efficient and more sensitive transit search than is possible from any other single site on Earth.

The Vulcan South Photometer is a telescope specially designed, built, and adapted to the extreme conditions at the South Pole. It is designed to make precise measurements of the brightness of thousands of stars simultaneously. The system is a refractor using a fast lens and CCD camera detector mounted on a temperature compensated stable optical bench. The optics are enclosed in an insulated and heated shell and look out through a 10-inch optical window.

Vulcan South is currently unfunded but we are reapplying for funding. Some of the Vulcan South team are also members of the NASA Kepler Mission and so are busy getting ready for the launch of that mission (February 2009). We hope to get Vulcan South online again sometime after that. More information about the Vulcan South project can be found at:  http://www.polartransits.org/.

The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile at sunset, preparing for a night's work. ©National Optical Astronomy Observatory/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy/National Science Foundation

Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile

We have been invited to have two PlanetQuest telescopes at Cerro Tololo. http://www.ctio.noao.edu/

2.5-meter PlanetQuest Telescope(s)

PlanetQuest is considering building at least one 2.5-meter wide-angle reflecting telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) dedicated to monitoring the 170 million stars (cataloged by the OGLE project) in the direction of the Galactic center in Sagittarius and the 30 million additional stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds that can be measured with sufficient photometric precision to detect the larger terrestrial planets around the smallest stars. Precision photometry should be able to reach 21st magnitude, allowing the majority of stars to be K and M dwarfs.