MINERVA control software effortlessly

alters robotic telescope operations

Achieving sub-millimagnitude precision

with one MINERVA telescope

Meeting the challenge of bright star photometry

with MINERVA

· 4 telescope array

· 0.7m diameter per telescope

· Doppler Shift precision < 1 m/s

· Photometric precision < 1 mmag

Fig. 2: After observing these two defocused bright stars

(undergoing no exoplanet transit) via 1 telescope, a

photometric precision of 2.7 mmag was achieved [1].

Fig. 3: Once binned down to timescale of ~200s (or 3 min),

the observational scatter of the 16 Cyg A light curve

is < 1 mmag [1].

References

[1] Swift et al., 2015, JATIS 1, 2

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the

National Science Foundation

Want More Details?

https://mwilson1.github.io/research/projects.html

Maurice Wilson

My code allows us to conduct automated observations such as this example.

To avoid saturating the CCD with our bright targets, we use the defocusing technique.

Timescale (s)

RM

S (

mm

ag)

Rel

ativ

e M

agni

tude

(m

mag

)

Time since start (minutes)

· Location: Mt. Hopkins in Arizona

· Mission: Detect, confirm, and characterize nearby Earth-like exoplanets

· Optimize control software of robotic telescopes for photometric and spectroscopic observations

High Precision Photometry of Bright Transiting Exoplanets

with MINERVA

Fig. 1: Demonstration of MINERVA’s 4 telescopes observing distinct

regions of the sky (Credit: Miguel Claro). With MINERVA, 3 additional

telescopes can be used to find the bright comparison stars needed to

conduct relative photometry.

Maurice Wilson, Jason Eastman, John Johnson

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; maurice.wilson@cfa.harvard.edu

MINERVA specs MINERVA objectives

Graduate Research Fellowship Program.