Engaging Citizen Scientists to Keep Transit Times Fresh and Ensure the Efficient Use of Transiting Exoplanet Characterization Missions

This white paper advocates for the creation of a community-wide program to maintain precise mid-transit times of exoplanets that would likely be targeted by future platforms. Given the sheer number of targets that will require careful monitoring between now and the launch of the next generation of exoplanet characterization missions, this network will initially be devised as a citizen science project -- focused on the numerous amateur astronomers, small universities and community colleges and high schools that have access to modest sized telescopes and off-the-shelf CCDs.Comment: White Paper submitted to Astro2020 Science Call, 5 pages, 3 figures, community comments and involvement are welcome

astroplan: An Open Source Observation Planning Package in Python

We present astroplan - an open source, open development, Astropy affiliated package for ground-based observation planning and scheduling in Python. astroplan is designed to provide efficient access to common observational quantities such as celestial rise, set, and meridian transit times and simple transformations from sky coordinates to altitude-azimuth coordinates without requiring a detailed understanding of astropy's implementation of coordinate systems. astroplan provides convenience functions to generate common observational plots such as airmass and parallactic angle as a function of time, along with basic sky (finder) charts. Users can determine whether or not a target is observable given a variety of observing constraints, such as airmass limits, time ranges, Moon illumination/separation ranges, and more. A selection of observation schedulers are included which divide observing time among a list of targets, given observing constraints on those targets. Contributions to the source code from the community are welcome

Engaging Citizen Scientists to Keep Transit Times Fresh and Ensure the Efficient Use of Transiting Exoplanet Characterization Missions

This white paper advocates for the creation of a community-wide program to maintain precise mid-transit times of exoplanets that would likely be targeted by future platforms. Given the sheer number of targets that will require careful monitoring between now and the launch of the next generation of exoplanet characterization missions, this network will initially be devised as a citizen science project -- focused on the numerous amateur astronomers, small universities and community colleges and high schools that have access to modest sized telescopes and off-the-shelf CCDs

Project PANOPTES: a citizen-scientist exoplanet transit survey using consumer digital cameras

Empirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 60-62.1. Introduction -- 2. Science -- 3. Hardware -- 4. Software -- 5. Data processing -- 6. Conclusion -- Appendix -- References.Project PANOPTES is aimed at establishing a collaboration between professional astronomers, citizen scientists, and schools in order to discover a large number of exoplanets using the transit technique. An imaging unit based on consumer digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras has been designed to run automatically every night, covering large parts of the sky looking for exoplanet transits. At a cost of $5000 USD, the units are a low-cost and efficient system for wide field astronomical imaging, offering approximately two orders of magnitude better étendue per unit of cost than professional wide-field surveys. Critical to the success of the project, a robust and flexible software control system was developed, as discussed in this work. The properties and capabilities of the DSLR camera as an imaging device are also explored, along with a demonstration of the algorithm required for successful processing and detection. Both science and outreach, our vision is to have dozens of units built by schools and citizen scientists in the next few years, helping make this project the most productive exoplanet discovery machine in the world.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (ix, 62 pages) colour illustration

Project PANOPTES : a citizen-scientist exoplanet transit survey using commercial digital cameras

Project PANOPTES (http://www.projectpanoptes.org) is aimed at establishing a collaboration between professional astronomers, citizen scientists and schools to discover a large number of exoplanets with the transit technique. We have developed digital camera based imaging units to cover large parts of the sky and look for exoplanet transits. Each unit costs approximately $5000 USD and runs automatically every night. By using low-cost, commercial digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras, we have developed a uniquely cost-efficient system for wide field astronomical imaging, offering approximately two orders of magnitude better etendue per unit of cost than professional wide-field surveys. Both science and outreach, our vision is to have thousands of these units built by schools and citizen scientists gathering data, making this project the most productive exoplanet discovery machine in the world.9 page(s