Exoplanet Transit Follow-Up Tool

Abstract

This thesis describes the development of a website called the Transit Follow Up Tool (https://observatory.herts.ac.uk/exotransitpredict) in order to plan exoplanet transit observations. Website models have been developed to predict the photometric precision for observations using telescopes from the University of Hertfordshire's Bayfordbury Observatory, Thai Robotic Telescope Spring Brook Observatory, Thai National Telescope and the Open University PIRATE facility. The website can predict the transit times for exoplanets and TESS objects of interest (TOI) and predict the precision that would be achieved. Ten transits have been recorded during the thesis, four of these are TOIs. For the confirmed exoplanets, two transits for HAT-P-20 b and single transits for HAT-P-44b, KPS-1 b, WASP-12 b and WASP-52 b were recorded. The TESS Objects of interest 516.01, 689.01, 1164.01 and 1455.01 were all found to be false positives. The predictions of uncertainty for the transit fit are within 0.1 ppt over nine of the transits for six different telescope setups. The transit fits are within the expected literature results. Much of the work has been concerned with improvement of observing procedures for different telescopes and in particular calibration measurements. For example, comparing the predicted uncertainty for the PIRATE telescope over 1x1 and 2x2 binning, it is found that 2x2 is always better by around 20%. It was also found that precision in mmag could be improved by approximately 5-20% depending on the combination of exposure time and magnitude combination due to underexposed at field images.