An Exoplanet Transit Observing Method using LCO Telescopes, ExoRequest and astrosource.

Abstract

Exoplanets have become a very active focus of research in the past few years. This is especially true now as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched in April of 2018 and is expected to find thousands of potential candidate exoplanets every year, with the expectation that students and pro-ams will undertake much of the follow-up work. This paper presents a worked example for those intending to get started with observing exoplanets. We analyzed the transit of the planet HAT P- 56 b utilizing data from Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) Telescopes and two python scripts. One of the scripts, Exorequest, assists with planning the transit observation while the other, astrosource, automates much of the photometric processing of the transit. While this method uses the LCO data and scheduler, this method will work with any typical optical images.