Open Source Photometry Code Allows Amateur Astronomers To Detect Exoplanets

An anonymous reader writes "Have access to a telescope with a CCD? Now you can make your very own exoplanet transit curves. Brett Morris, a student from the University of Maryland, has written an open source photometry application known as Oscaar. In a recent NASA Press Release, Morris writes: "The purpose of a differential photometry code – the differential part – is to compare the changes in brightness of one star to another nearby. That way you can remove changes in stellar brightness due to the Earth's atmosphere. Our program measures the brightness change of all the stars in the telescope's field of view simultaneously, so you can pull out the change in brightness that you see from the planet-hosting star due to the transit event." The program opens up exoplanet-observing to amateur astronomers and undergraduate students across the globe."

Comments

Open the floodgates!

[FridayBob]

Thousands more exoplanets coming your way! Good news indeed.

Re:Open the floodgates!

[Ken_g6]

Thousands more exoplanets coming your way! Good news indeed.

I don't want even one exoplanet coming my way! I want them to stay in their own solar systems where they belong!

Re:Open the floodgates!

[girlintraining]

It's news, what's "good" about it?

Like all scientific observation and understanding, the effect isn't of the immediate gratification variety we're so keen on in modern society; So it can be hard to see the good. But this is good; It will give us a much better basis for figuring out just how 'normal' our own solar system is, how common earth-like planets are, and perhaps with additional technological advances, where to send probes to search for life on other planets, or even someday to colonize with life. And not necessarily even human life -- we may just load up a probe with bacteria, amoeba, and other simple life and fire it at another planet... hoping that in a few million years, a viable ecosystem will have developed. Our legacy may not be us going to the stars, but rather the bacteria on our forks.

And besides learning more about how the universe is formed, these more detailed observations may open up avenues in physics -- dark matter is still not very well understood. The gravitational effects and whatnot may be too small to be noticable by observing stars... but if we get a few hundred thousand more data points out there that are much more sensitive to gravity waves... we may discover new physics, or confirm hypothesis, based on how these planets move, or gravitational lensing effects, etc.

It is indeed quite good -- and given how little investment is going into science these days... reducing the entry cost and operating costs of any area of scientific inquiry is much-needed.

Re:Open the floodgates!

[martinux]

The AC stares blankly at his monitor. AC shifts in their comfortable chair and then takes a moment to swallow a highly specific quantity of painkiller to combat the headache that's been bothering them for the past few hours. Inadvertently, AC drops some food onto their lap; nomatter, the washing machine in combination with that stain remover will make short work of that come laundry day.

A thought flits into AC's head for a moment, something about where all this technology came from. A related concept goes screaming past attached to the thought of sharing a picture of a cat with a humourous caption attached.

"Thank God for all this cool technology", thinks the AC.

Re: Open the floodgates!

[nospam007]

"Hint: the required level of photometry is *hard* and the atmosphere makes it *very very very hard"

OTOH Kepler's instruments are 10 years old.

Re:Er... what?

[Xolotl]

The high cost was in the hardware (telescope, CCD camera) not in the software. There have been open-source or free photometry codes available for years. Admittedly not all of them trivially easy to use, but then finding and observing the expolanet itself requires some ability and understanding. A popular and quite decent photometry program which is easy to use is C-Munipack. (Which is not to say another one isn't a good thing, the more the better.)

Re:Er... what?

[ceoyoyo]

Photometry is pretty trivial. GOOD photometry is less so, and good, easy to use photometry even less so. Photometry applied to planet hunting (longitudinal differential photometry with statistical analysis), which is what I assume OSCAAR does (the web page is a little unclear just how far it goes), is another couple of levels on top. OSCAAR's contribution might well be the planet hunting bit, not the photometry bit.

Telescopes and CCDs are cheap. Learning stats and signal processing is not.

Personally, I'd rather roll my own, but then stats and signal processing is what I do.

Re:There are lots of options

[mrsquid0]

IRAF has a very steep (and unforgiving) learning curve, and thus tends to be beyond most non-technical types. And the technical types are migrating to Pyraf.

big scopes

[Sperbels]

The program opens up exoplanet-observing to amateur astronomers and undergraduate students across the globe."

Yeah, but don't those with small telescopes just run into the same problem that asteroid observers have? New systems like Pan-STARRS with gigantic field of views and resolution can scan the whole sky very quickly and then a computer can simply analyze the superior data and come up with more numerous and more accurate discoveries...drowning out the discoveries from amateurs.

Re:There are lots of options

[mrsquid0]

Pyraf is a Python module that wraps IRAF. It allows one to write scripts and use all of the power of Python and its packages when doing photometry. It is far easier to do complex analysis using Pyraf than using the IRAF cl. I still sometimes use IRAF scripts from years ago, but I have not written a new one in a long time.