Exoplanet research without a telescope

What you can measure

During a transit, a planet passes in front of its host star and blocks a small fraction of its light. A series of images lets you measure the star’s brightness over time. Plotting those measurements produces a light curve.

You can work with observations from public telescope archives without collecting images yourself. Exoplanet World provides a workspace for reviewing those images, running EXOTIC, and preparing a report for AAVSO. A useful first project is to analyze a known transiting planet and explain the quality and limitations of your measurement.

Choose your first observing sequence

Open the research workspace and sign in with your AAVSO account. From New reduction, open the public archive or choose a ZIP of original observations you already have. MicroObservatory provides recent observing nights; LCO data can also be used where that archive is available in your workspace.

Choose one sequence for a known target. When possible, use a night that includes measurements before, during, and after the predicted transit. Those surrounding measurements help distinguish the transit from changes in observing conditions. A short or incomplete sequence can still be informative, but it needs a more cautious interpretation.

Turn the images into a measurement

Review the frames, confirm the planet and observing settings, and locate the target star. Select suitable comparison stars so the analysis can account for changes shared across the field. The EXOTIC guide explains this workflow in more detail.

The fitted curve is a model of the measurements. Review the individual points, their uncertainties, and the residuals rather than judging the result only by how smooth the model looks. Clouds, saturation, tracking problems, and neighboring stars can affect the measured brightness.

Make the project reproducible

Record the data source, observing date, telescope, filter, target, and choices you made while reviewing frames and stars. Keep the downloaded result package with your project notes. Explain why you excluded a frame or changed a comparison star.

For a class or club, compare the choices made by different students on the same observing sequence. Differences between reductions are an opportunity to examine uncertainty and method; they are not independent observations of additional transits.

When the reduction is ready, review the AAVSO submission guide. A submitted observation can support follow-up research, but a submission alone is not a new-planet discovery or a peer-reviewed publication.