Planet Hunt

The task this year is to study how the brightness of the star phunt001 changes over the course of the night and use that variability to hopefully detect the brightness drop when the transiting planet moves in front of it. This will help us to understand a bit more about the exoplanets.

Measuring the brightness of an object is one of the most important measurments in astronomy, so we will take a little bit of time learning how it is done.

While you are doing this you will learn several things:

1. What Image Data from telescopes is like.
2. How to download the Data (observations).
3. How to use the Image Processing software, LTImage.
4. How brightness is measured and how some of the problems are overcome.

Task 1.  Ask your teacher to make sure that the Image Processing Software (LTImage) is installed (the software can be downloaded from here).

Task 2.  Download some example observations.

Task 3.  Learn how to use the software (LTImage) to explore astronomical images.

Task 4.  Learn how to Measure Brightness with LTImage.