 from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, California. We're very excited to welcome our guest speaker, actually welcoming him back to the webinar. So we, Dr. Rob Zelm, Zelm was with us a couple of years ago. He's from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Welcome to everyone and joining us on YouTube. We're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are monthly events for members of the NASA Night Sky Network. For more information about the NASA Night Sky Network and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, we'll put some links in the chat in just a minute. And before we introduce Rob, here's Dave Prosper with just a couple of announcements. Oh, I don't have any announcements. I'll be putting links in. The announcement is, I told Vivian, she gets to do the announcement. Vivian. Tag. Hi, everyone. Welcome. I just wanted to introduce a really wonderful new partner that we have at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. We've got Kat Trosh here with us tonight. She's from the AAA, the Amateur Astronomers Association in New York. Also a solar system ambassador from JPL. We are thrilled that she has joined the Night Sky Network team, and you will likely be hearing from her soon. So hi, Kat. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Hello out there. I'm happy to be here. In addition to the NASA Night Sky Network, we are also facilitating and gearing up for our Eclipse Ambassadors program. So if you know any amateur astronomers or you know any undergrads that might be interested and haven't applied or haven't heard of the program, please go to eclipseambassadors.org and fill out the application. Thank you. Great to have you. I do have one announcement I can throw in real quick on top of that. There are astronomy awards. They are accepting your nominations from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. So please nominate your favorite astronomer or an award. I will put the link in the chat as well. You can find out the astrosociety.org homepage and there's a link to it in the newsletter as well for the Night Sky Network. All right. Sounds like that's it on the announcements for now. All right. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Vivian. And welcome, Kat. For those of you on Zoom, you can find the chat window and the Q&A window at the bottom edge of the Zoom window on your desktop. Please feel free to greet each other in the chat window, making sure that you select everyone so that we can all see your greetings. Also, let us know in the chat if you're having any technical difficulties or you can always send us an email at nightskyinfo at astrosociety.org. If you have a question for our speaker, please put it in the Q&A. That really helps us keep track of them and we'll know whether or not we've answered your question or not. Right. Welcome to the February webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Dr. Robert Zellum to our webinar. Rob Zellum is an exoplanet astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on ground and space-based observations of the atmospheres of exoplanets, planets outside of our solar system. He's the project lead of Exoplanet Watch, which you're going to hear a lot about this evening, a citizen science project that will aid in the characterization of exoplanets. This is you. All of you are the citizen scientists that really would like to get involved with helping Rob out and discovering all of these really great planets that we're hoping to find. Rob is also a member of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's coronagraph instrument project science team and is the lead of developing its science calibration plan. He's the JPL commissioning lead of NESSI, a new multi-object spectrograph at Palomar Observatory that will study tens of these alien worlds. And so Rob has got a lot of experience doing a lot of interesting things with looking at exoplanets and so I'm looking forward to hearing from him this evening. So please welcome Dr. Rob Zellum. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Thanks everyone for calling in, seeing tons of people calling in from all across the nation. That's pretty awesome. I'm in Southern California and you're having a weather storm, winter storm out here. So it's a little bit chillier than normal, some all bundled up. So in my guest room slash office, thanks to COVID. But yeah, it's also super cloudy out here unfortunately and that's probably my fault because we have some telescopes are trying to get online out here in Southern California to help with this project, which I'll be talking about tonight. So thank you again for having me. I think the last time I was here was back in 2021 and there I just sort of gave an overview of about exoplanets and tonight, as the intro said, I'll be talking about our citizen science initiative to where all of you can participate and help us observe transiting exoplanets. So I'm here to talk about exoplanet watch, our citizen science project to observe transiting exoplanets. So we actually just announced the launch of this project last month at the big astronomical society meeting, American astronomical society meeting that happens every winter, sometimes called the Super Bowl of astronomy. And we just announced there the launch of our general audience launch of axle planet watch. So previously, we've actually been working on this project to the last probably four or five years. And in 2021, as we had a limited launch with amateur astronomers and other professional astronomers, so doing sort of these releases, if you will, or light launches to various user groups. And since then, we've just been really lucky to have an amazing user base and get tons of people joining this project. And now we're happy to launch to anyone and every even if you don't have your own telescope or access to clear skies, and anyone ever can participate. And this gives you the opportunity to learn how exoplanet science is really done. So just some quick background for folks who might not be aware about transiting exoplanets. A transit is when we're observing a host star for really lucky that host star will have a planet orbiting around it. And if we're even luckier, the geometry will be just right, or that planet will occasionally pass in front of its star, and partially block out the light of the host star and cause the star to appear to dim ever so slightly. And the amount of the dimming is directly related to the ratio and the size of the planet to the stars. So the bigger the planet, the bigger its area, the more light it blocks out from its host star, the bigger the signal, smaller the planet, less area, smaller signal that blocks out the light of the host star, smaller dim brightness. So you can actually use the transit method very importantly to directly measure the radii of these exoplanets. But the transit method also affords us the opportunity to study a planet's atmosphere. When the planet passes in front of the star, not only does the optically thick part of the disk of the planet blocks out the light from the host star, but also the very small little sliver of atmosphere around the planet as well. And the atmosphere of the exoplanet will absorb or scatter light from the host star at various wavelengths, depending on what molecules are present in the planet's atmosphere. So for example, if there is methane in the planet's atmosphere, it'll block out light at a specific wavelength. If there's water, it'll block out light at another wavelength. So by studying these transit events at multiple wavelengths, we can actually characterize the composition of these exoplanets without even having to travel there. And this is called transmission spectroscopy or atmospheric transmission characterization of these exoplanets. And this has been done very, very successfully on missions such as Hubble, Hubble's observed about 50 of these transient exoplanets and characterize their atmospheres. James Webb is currently doing amazing work. Almost every single new observation by James Webb is completely revolutionary and groundbreaking. And what he's doing is expanding upon that amazing heritage that we got a lot from Hubble. But now we're using this giant mirror, you know, Hubble is about two and a half meters, James Webb is between six and eight meters. This thing is absolutely ginormous to use a technical term. This purple thing on the bottom is actually a sun shield and it's the size of a tennis court. And James Webb not only has this much larger primary mirror, which gets us a lot higher precision data, but it also has expanded wavelength coverage. So James Webb is able to look at more wavelengths of light and therefore characterize more molecules on the atmosphere's planets. And James Webb is predicted to maybe observe tens if not hundreds of exoplanets. Looking even farther into the future, though, there's a mission coming up by the end of this decade called aerial. This is a European space agency mission that will be dedicated to doing atmospheric transmission spectroscopy of up to a thousand exoplanets. So the future is very, very bright for transit science and arguably we're in the golden age of exoplanet transits. And in order to observe a transit event on any of these three telescopes, we have to know very precisely when these transit events will occur. If there's an uncertainty in that transit event, we can do one or two things. Let's say there's like a five minute uncertainty of when that next transit event will occur. Well, one thing we could do is we can just build in an extra amount of time into our observing campaign. So if there's a 15 minute uncertainty in our transit time, that's 15 more minutes we can build into our campaign. That's not really an efficient use of these telescopes though. These are all very precious resources that everyone in astronomy wants to use. Anytime that we're wasting is effectively time we're detracting or taking away from additional science that these platforms could be using. Another option is is we can do some pre observations from the ground. And this is where all of you can come in. You can help us make these observations to measure when these transit events will occur to help us more accurately predict when the next transit will occur. And then we can use large telescopes like Hubble and James Webb like Ariel, also ground based telescopes. We can use them a lot more efficiently and effectively. And we waste a lot less time. And therefore we can hopefully maximize their science output. So this sort of driving need to update these times and keep our transit times fresh to use these platforms a lot more efficiently is what led us to launch Exoplanet Watch which is the Citizen Science Project to observe routinely transiting exoplanets. So by doing so by participating in this project you can directly help enable NASA science. So Exoplanet Watch is a collaborative effort to complement existing surveys. We're members of the TAS follow up project SG-1 group in the single transitors group. I know probably a bunch of you work on TFOP and SG-1. We're also parts we're very collaborative with effectively the European version of Exoplanet Watch called XO Clock. And that's a very similar project out of Europe that is doing the same transit timing ephemeris maintenance that we are but they're focused on helping out the aerial mission alone or specifically. All of our data is immediately public. There's no proprietary phase. So you can actually get any of our data whenever you want. We have target requests by professional astronomers. We actually had a campaign in November of 2021 that I'll be talking about tonight as well where we actually had a request by some professional astronomers who want to use James Webb to observe a target and we helped save them about three hours of observing time. For your work any observers will be listed as co-authors. I feel very very strongly about this because if you do the work you deserve the credit and we are part of NASA's universal learning and funded free end of 2026 I believe. So as a citizen science project we have two overarching goals. We have those science goals that I mentioned before so you know the efficient use of large telescopes. We can also discover and confirm new exoplanets as a T-FOT member. We can also monitor for stellar variability which is very important when we're observing transits because we're always making differential measurements of a planet relative to its star. So if the star signal changes to star spots or flares that could actually impact our interpretation of the exoplanets atmosphere. A planet that we think is cloudy could be clear or a planet that we think is clear could be hazy and that could have large ramifications for what we think its composition is. But as a citizen science project we also have these educational goals to engage and teach the public about exoplanets and enable them to do science and our evil plan is basically to help inspire the next generation of folks to join STEM fields hopefully astronomy and help get more folks involved and interested in joining astronomy or other STEM fields as well. So before I give sort of a quick overview of the entire project I'd like to first show off our exoplanet watch team. At the top we have our three awesome interns. There's Izzy Huckabee who's an undergrad at Arizona State University, a senior and has just gone into some graduate schools. So congratulations to Izzy. In the middle top is Kaya May. She's an undergrad at University of Colorado Boulder and then Tameem Fatahi at the top right at Cal Poly Slow. On the bottom we have John Engelke who's at Raytheon and one of our software engineers. He's our development lead of our pipeline called Citizens I'll be talking about later. Right here is Kyle Pearson our deputy science lead. There's Rachel's and Brockman our outreach and engagement lead and then this weird dude is I think the project lead for this project so we'll ignore him maybe for a little bit. All right so here's a quick sort of overview of this project as a whole. It's a little overwhelming first little step through it. Let's say you have your own telescope and you like to participate in this project. Well what you would do is you'd go to our website and on there we have a little link that says what to observe and we have a plug-in through the Swarthmore Transit Finder where you can actually identify the high priority Exoplanet Watch target lists that are observable from anywhere in the world. So you can actually see what Exoplanet Watch recommended targets are available for you to observe tonight. So I mean it's clear. That being said you can observe any target you want. You can observe even targets that folks have observed since the mid 90s when they were first discovering Transmit Exoplanets will accept data on any single target. Then after you plan your observations you go out and observe. Here's actually one of our users Brian Martin in front of his setup and then hopefully you get a clear night and you get some nice looking data. If you don't have your own telescope or access to a telescope or if it's super cloudy where you are right now you can actually use our data checkout system to request data of your own. So we're very lucky and fortunate to have this amazing partnership with the micro-observatory which is run out of Harvard, Smithsonian and they have a network of six inch robotic telescopes. A majority of them are in Tucson, Arizona and southwest of the U.S. They also have a few in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the northeast of the U.S. and these telescopes as you can see in this picture here they're actually fully weather proof. You observe every single night of the year rain or shine and they actually donated to us over 10 years of archival data that they've been collecting. That's about 2,000 data sets. So again if you don't have your own data you can go on our website and you can use our data checkout tool or our data request tool. Just type in your email address just prove you're not a robot by selecting the stop signs and that little three by three graded images and in a few minutes assuming our email server is back up you'll get email directly to you one of these sample data sets. So either get your data by observing yourself or you can get it from us from our archival data sets. The next step is you analyze your data. So for data analysis this is where you take your raw images typically in fits formats and then you process them to make a data product, a time series, a light curve that shows the transit event occurring. You can use any data analysis tool you want. One big one that tons of folks use out there is Astro ImageJ. We also have our own in-house software called Exotic. I'll be talking about this a little bit later but we've been doing a ton of work to make this a lot more user friendly for our network. So this allows the opportunity to actually fully have that hands-on process of learning not only how observations are done and conducted you get your own data and you get to analyze and reduce it yourself to get those data products. Then when you're done with your analysis you upload it to the AAVSO or the American Association of Variable Star Observers Exoplanet Database. We're extremely lucky to have this amazing partnership with the AAVSO. They're letting us use their database for free to stage all of our data and all of our users can sign up for a free AAVSO account and upload their data to this account as well. It really makes our lives much easier. I remember we were fretting on what we would do to enable users to contribute data to us and for some reason JPL didn't want random people uploading data to their network for some reason. I don't know. So AAVSO really saved us here and really made this very, very easy and they're absolutely the light to work with. So then after you contribute your data to the AAVSO and sit back, relax, you get on published papers as co-authors if your data is being published for the first time. But also you can go on our website right now and look at any of our data and any of our data products and write any paper you want. I mentioned there's no proprietary phase. I'm giving you all permission to go on our website right now and grab our data and scoop us. We have about 16 papers that have been published that use exotic or exoplanet watch data or data products and only two of them have been written by professional astronomers. We really encourage our users to lead their own studies, to write their own papers and a lot of those are actually written as first author papers by high school students. So this is a great project to get involved with if you're an instructor out there that's looking for a project for your school group to work on or anyone if you want to start publishing or contribute to publish papers as well. So I mentioned exotic or data analysis tool that it stands for exoplanet transit interpretation code. This is our real astronomy analysis tool. So this is literally the same exact code that we use as professional astronomers to analyze our data and our observations. The only difference is that we might run exotic locally on our own computers whereas we have made exotic compatible with the Google Colab cloud. So what this enables you to do is you can actually get on your smartphone and sign into this website just using a free Google account and you can run it exotic completely on Google servers for free. This is key because you don't have to worry about installing Python or installing the right Python packages which can be a pain and very confusing and doesn't always work correctly. This takes the stress and the hassle out of all that just go to our website there's a link that says exotic and you could select the version that's appropriate for you and you can analyze your data in as little as about five to ten minutes and that's going from your raw images to a fully analyzed science grade like her. I can say science grade because we actually published our paper in 2020 using the outputs of exotic and you will get plots that look just like this that you can also publish in your own papers and this is to teach you how science is done. This is a real tool used by real professional astronomers. We also have step-by-step tutorials on how to use exotic and we're making some videos as well to help out. Tonight I'll be stepping you through the intro version of exotic if there's time. Also if you do choose to run exotic locally there is a real-time light curve fitter as well. So let's say you're at a star party and you want to observe an exoplanet. Well by eye it's not too interesting to see because you're looking for a best about a one percent drop in the brightness of that star over the course of about two to three hours. It's really difficult to see by eye. What you can do is you can observe that transit and you can do this quick and dirty reduction of your data in real time and you can point your computer screen you can say that someone that's passing by look at this we're observing an exoplanet passing in front of its star and it's effectively casting its shadow all the way back on the earth and we're hundreds of light years away and we've been finding that small telescopes are absolutely capable of making these measurements we're getting a lot of amazing success and really high quality data with six inch observatories such as the micro observatory we've also had some users with a three and a half inch telescope with an equatorial mount and a ccd camera that have been able to get really nice looking light curves even from the pacific northwest so and we're also have observers in the la area there's a guy just two towns over for me outside of la and he's routinely observing almost every single night one to two transits and getting amazing data quality so you don't need a big telescope you don't need dark sky conditions to do these observations and contribute back to this project so that's sort of what's happening in the front end you know you can make your own observations you can request data from us you analyze your own data you upload that data to the AAVSO and then you sort of sit back and relax and get published or published your own studies what happens on the back end though is our pipeline called citizens this is not a typo that's an acronym that stands for the citizen initiated transit information survey and enabling NASA science kind of a mouthful there but what citizens does is it automatically goes out to the AAVSO exoplanet database and scrapes it every other night and we download all of the observations on the AAVSO website we then reprocess the data by refitting it with model light curves this is done in case our knowledge of an exoplanet system is updated or changed over time due to new discoveries we then immediately publish all of these results to our websites you can actually go on our website right now we have over 160 targets actually it's 260 targets and over 1600 datasets as well so incredible amount of data and I'm sure that'll be updated very soon because I think citizens is running tonight perhaps so maybe by tomorrow morning or Saturday we'll have increased numbers as well so this pipeline is fully automated there's no human loop it runs completely on its own it grabs the data reprocesses it really refits the data and then immediately publishes it to our website I mentioned a little earlier how we had this observing campaign in December of 2021 just a few months I think after I gave my last talk here and what we did is we observed this target called HG80606B this is a long period transiting exoplanets so it pass orbits around a star every hundred days or so most exoplanets that we're finding of today are called hot Jupiters large Jupiter like planets bigger the planet the more light up blocks out from its host star the bigger the signal the easier it is to see and these hot Jupiters orbit their stars very closely typically on the order of about three to five days some as quickly as a few hours orbiting around their star because they're still very close to their host star and since they're close to their star they're bright so hence the very inventive named hot Jupiters this one in particular though orbits a star roughly about every hundred days and as such this is so much farther away from its star a transit event the time it takes for that planet to pass in front of its star takes on the order of about 12 hours and when we make these transit observations we not only need to observe the in transit portion of the data the planet's passing up from the star we also need out of transit baseline to help establish the baseline of our observations so this 12 hour transit observation could easily be 14 or 24 hours of observing which is impossible for any single location on the earth to observe and the reason we care about observing about this transit so much is because in a few months this will be observed by the James West base telescope so some of the folks that are on this proposal came to us to ask us for our help with analyzing their data to really to help them update the mid transit time of this target and we went to our users and had a big observing campaign over the nights of December 5th and 6th and maybe the 7th as well this target was observable over most of the northern atmosphere so we actually had folks in eastern Asia start observing the pre transit baseline they handed it off to folks I believe in India to folks in Europe and then back to North America and then back to eastern Asia again and we were able to stitch all the data together to make this nice looking light curve and this is pretty cool because folks in eastern Asia who observed it one night were able to get post transit baseline again as well and another thing is of course because we were trying to do an observing campaign most of the northern hemisphere was clouded out this entire night while we had 24 facilities participating this project all of them relatively small telescopes under 30 inches a lot of them were actually unisteler scopes EV scopes as well which are about four and a half inches so relatively small telescopes made really nice science grade data but as I mentioned before most of the northern hemisphere was clouded out that night we probably had another factor of two more folks that were interested in participating in this project but were clouded out so this directly shows why a nice worldwide spread out campaign is necessary to follow up particularly these long period trans and the exoplanets but also plants in general because anywhere in the world can be cloudy at any given night and if you're able to spread out your assets as much as possible you can guard against the impacts of weather and let's look at the data really quickly so here's actually the individual observations from all of our users and if you're to look at the data on a case by case basis it would be sometimes hard to see evidence of the transit signal itself and if you had this as a single observation you know it wouldn't be statistically significant enough to say really anything much about the exoplanet observations but then when you combine all the data together you get this really nice looking light curve and for your comparison if you compare this against the test mission uh test is a transing exoplanet survey satellite that was launched a few years by nasa it's doing a full sky survey to discover new exoplanets but it's also monitoring already known planets to help um learn more about them and update their timings if we were to compare this light curve to tests some of our users were able to get within a factor of two of the precision of the test mission which is pretty incredible you know they're able to get within a factor of two of the precision of a nasa mission up in space from the relatively small ground-based telescope so this really shows the power in these observations so if you're interested in getting started and participating in our project we'd love to have anyone and everyone participating this you can go to our website right there you can also take a picture of this qr code on your cell or mobile phone i personally am horrible memorizing urls i can never remember also qr codes for some strange reason so what i just do instead is i google nasa exoplanet watch and on there we have tons of extremely helpful resources on our website you can get involved on there and go through our tutorials or any of our information that steps you through how to use exotic how to upload your data how to do the observations we have these monthly newsletters that rachel does an amazing job of sending out and we have target campaigns for observing we also have these bi-weekly meetings that happen every other wednesday 11 am pacific and i know that some of you can't make that time but we record every meeting and post that into our slack channel as well so if you can't make a meeting we can go through that you can watch the recording there and we have really helpful tips such as explaining how to use exotic in the best way or what are the output plots mean or how to help filter your data through as well as i mentioned we also have this slack channel and this is a group chat tool that we use all the time extensively to help keep in touch with our users so you can actually go on our slack channel right now and you can ping the exoplanet watch team and since i always have it open on my cell phone i'll get a vibration that folks are asking for help or asking a question and we always try to respond very very quickly even if it's a hey it's kind of late here in southern california we'll get back to you tomorrow or on monday we always try to be very engaged with our users and we also have tons of users that are helping out other exoplanet watch members as well so it's a really awesome friendly collaboration we owe a lot of our success to our current members as well who are being amazing and helping out our new users so there's always someone to wake across the world in our project and we also have some goofy fun stuff like our random channel here's kaya posting a funny meme about mercury i guess on monday as i mentioned before these slide is a little out of date because we have launched out two folks that do not have their own telescope we've been leveraging the micro observatory those six inch telescopes out in tusan we're also have two telescopes out here in southern california that we have full control over at least through the end of 2026 here's a picture of inside the dome from our 0.4 meter telescope i'm a giant star wars nerd so i named this one luke because this is the first of the two of our scopes that came online and we're very very close to getting this automated we just had our weather sensor installed a few weeks ago and there's a little bit more tweaking that to do with the dome alignment so i'm hopefully excited about going up there maybe sometime the next few weeks we'll get clear weather again in southern california we also have our in second let me just fix this really quickly we also have our 0.6 meter telescope that just came online as well so that's a picture of the outside dome of our 0.6 meter since this is the second telescope in our network this is called the leia telescope this just got online last week they fixed uh they just refurbished the telescope and they got it all focused up and of course as soon as we tried to get up there we have this giant winter storm out here on the west coast so hopefully we'll be up to these two telescopes very soon and we'll combine these two with the micro observatory so you can hopefully be getting three maybe even five maybe six transits a night and that's more data that you can get out to people who don't have their own telescopes or who don't live in dark sky locations so i'm going to pause here for one quick second i'm going to check the chat to see if there's any questions i see there's a ton of questions in the qa which is awesome so why don't i get to those now and then if there's enough time left over i can walk you through our website really quickly and also show you our data analysis tool so is that okay brian rob before we start that i'd like to introduce rachel zimmerman brockman who is the uh the public engagement lead on on this and i would like to invite her to help out with the q and a and and so as you can see it i'm just going to kind of let you to um have at it without wane and myself so i'm fantastic yeah no problem so the first question for you rob is from urturo six narrows and he's saying to get the planet size you need the star size do you get the star size from the spectral type uh there's a variety of different ways you can get the star size some of them have been directly uh measured uh through various techniques but a lot of times you're right it's through spectral analysis by looking at the spectral type of the star and then estimating the the radius of the star from there uh that being said there are always updates to the radius of the star and there's updates to the radius of the star there are also updates to the radius of the planet as well excellent next question we have is can the unisteller ev scope integrate into the system we can tie into seddy and much citizen science has been done since 2020 yep and seddy and unisteller are actually awesome collaborators of ours and participants in exoplanet watch so let me pull up this page again one quick second so this is part of our hd 806 of six campaign that's was actually been published about two to three months ago so to update that you'll see that actually a few of these unisteller are unisteller telescopes those are three and a half inch telescopes made by the unisteller corporation their ev scopes and their data quality is actually really outstanding for such a relatively small four and a half inch telescope i forget which of these plots there are but they are contributing regularly observations for projects we really appreciate their their participation it's amazing you really don't need a very big telescope as long as you have a good tracking that's really the important things being able to follow the same star with course the night if you can the next question is definitely helps for sure yeah the next question is related to that which is how do you normalize across all possible equipment types um what helps is um by using comparison stars so a comparison star is a nearby star in the field that is supposed to track out or assess the uncertainties in your data and allow you to then characterize them and remove them from your system um so that was basically by leveraging uh spectral or uh comparison stars you can then normalize across different uh equipment types we're also finding a strength in numbers play you know you could have a user that accidentally observes the wrong target or might not have a high quality day set because maybe there was very high surface clouds they couldn't see by eye but it impacted the scatter and their data and what we're able to do is by assessing all the observations that have been uploaded to our pipeline from a single target we can actually sort of weed out you know data sets that might be questionable you know whether that's due to weather impacts or maybe actually looking at the wrong target um for the normalization for the um 80606 observations Kyle Pearson who is our deputy science lead did a lot of processing post-processing to make sure all the data aligned and basically added loft sets to make the data all continuous and line up along that um that transit model great the next question is how long does a typical transit take so a typical transit takes uh the transit itself takes about two three hours and then you typically want as much uh post and pre transit baseline so out of transit data as you do in transit data so if an in transit observation when the planet starts to pass in front of its star that takes about two to three hours that means typically you want another two to three hours of out of transit baseline as well but you can also get away if only about half an hour to an hour of pre and post transit baseline so typically on the order of about three maybe six hours so you could fit in two transits a night typically and a related question is can you give us an idea of the exposure time for these observations the exposure time for these observations uh which one Rachel sorry oh sorry uh can you uh sir can you give an idea of the exposure time for the observations oh uh exposure times vary by your instrument depends on the host star brightness it can be short as a second it could be as long as a minute um typically you don't want to go much longer than a minute or a few minutes because you can get star trails if you're tracking isn't set up perfectly but it you know that's not a giant deal as well so it kind of depends on the size of your aperture of your telescope and the host star brightness you're looking at some of these host stars are as bright as roughly fifth magnitude in v-band some of them can be 10th 11th 12th magnitude so it kind of depends up on your setup and target as well um can you use an alt azimuth mount for your telescope or do you need to have an equatorial mount you can use an alt as telescope with a guider um the tracking will be a little more difficult we've experimented with an alt as mount and the tracking is not as precise you might need to nudge the target back into the field of view continuously like every 10 15 30 minutes or so um we did have fairly good luck with using an off axis guider the separate guider camera um that didn't require as much nudging but at the end of the day we found that an equatorial mount just made your life much easier it was able to track for a long period of time about six hours on your target and stay relatively closely aligned with your target but yes you can use a alt az telescope for this and on that mode and you can also use a zwo not cooled planetary camera we actually use one of those ourselves we have a six six six six telescopes they're celestrons that are um optical tube assemblies right off of from Celestron's website I think and we got these equatorial mounts and then we have like I think one of the $200 zwo cameras it's not cooled at all and it's able to get really great data and actually one of these data sets in here from our hd80606 campaign one of these is actually by one of our interns who observed this that fall with one of our exoplanet watch setups I forget exactly which these data sets is him but he was actually able to do this with that six inch telescope the six inch celestron um with the old both the equatorial mounts and the zwo camera from the top of the astronomy building in pasadena so he was able to make these observations despite having nearby light pollution cool another question that came in is what's the difference between exoplanet watch and the exoplanet research workshop both listed on size starter I am not sure I've not heard of the exoplanet research network shop so I'll have to take a look on that but yeah I'll take a look I'm not really sure James sorry about that and then Steve Taylor's asking how has anyone managed to use a raspberry pi hq camera on a scope I don't know if anyone's used a raspberry pi hq camera I know folks that use raspberry pies all the time somewhere amateur astronomers use it to automate their observatories and take some of their images you can actually hop on our slack channel we have an observing slack channel as well where we have a lot of our amateur astronomers and they're super nice and friendly and they can actually let you know if they have used those setups to make our observations we also have an astrophotography channel on our slack so if you are already taking beautiful pictures with your telescope and cameras I feel free to post those there as well and some of those pictures do end up at our monthly newsletter the next question is have you observed an exoplanet passing in front of a star spot I have and the star spots can actually be a pain for transit observations because when the planet passes in front of the star spot it's sampling a different part of the stellar photosphere than the rest of the stellar photosphere and again this is a differential measurement when you're making a transit so if the planet passes in part of the star that is different than when you expect it to normally be such as you know you think the star is not spotted but during your transit observation the star is spotted that can actually change and alter your transit signal and by changing your transit signal that can change the interpretation of your data as well so have some data sets and other folks have data sets as well too but we'll see a little bump in their transit signal that indicates that they're passing in front of a star spot but really what's worse than this is when you're passing over a spotted portion of the star you don't know because the star is super spotted or those spots are off axis so spots can actually be a pain and actually we have to do a more in-depth job of directly addressing them for especially now that we're in the the age of JWST because JWST has such higher precision in its observational capability that assessing the impact of star spots is more crucial. Yeah and that actually ties into the fact that we observe the same exoplanet more than once and so you may it may not be passing in front of the same star spot the next time you see it depending on how you know how the planet how the star is rotating how the planet is passing in front of it so observing the same exoplanet more than transiting its star more than once is actually pretty useful because you can see changes over time. Our next question from Jeffrey Beck is can you say more about how data from different observers is combined and analyzed how do you account for different sensitivities or calibrations of different instruments or cameras? Yeah so I kind of talked about this a little earlier basically you're observing the same astrophysical signal so you look for the common mode signal that's shared between them and then you sort of combine the data from multiple folks that way and so luckily from your data analysis and by including in comparison star you can actually monitor these these systematic errors that are inherent in every system and help characterize them or remove them so they don't impact your observations as much as possible. Cool um Tree Greenwood is asking can a tracking dobsonian like a soya archer since as scan be used rather than an equatorial? I do not know of that type of mounts type so um I would hop on our observing channel see if anyone else has experience with that but yes if you can observe and track on a star even if your tracking is not precise you know it's not a giant deal really at the end of the day the star just has to be somewhere on your camera on your image exotic or data analysis is able to track the star across the field for you it can also handle pier flips very easily now so um really you don't need precise tracking the micro observatory images for example that I've been showing these really nice light curves um let me grab I think it's in this slideshow let me grab it really quickly you're probably seeing the wrong screen that's fine right this light curve right here this is actually data from the micro observatory and this target actually went across and wandered across the focal plane by a few hundred pixels and despite that we were able to track the star pretty easily and make a nice looking micro there's someone in the chat mentioning um Nina and that there's an exoplanet watch plug-in for Nina exactly yeah they've awesomely added thanks Michael for reminding me about the exoplanet watch plug-in for Nina so Nina is actually the software we're using to get our 0.4 meter telescope up and running it makes observations of transient exoplanets really simple through all their super helpful plugins and you can actually query pretty easily the recommended targets that we have as well uh Jeff is also asking in the chat if the AVSO upload is necessary um they absolutely yeah the AVSO upload is absolutely necessary because that is the way you can contribute your data to us there's no other way to do this without us getting in trouble from JPL um there you don't actually have to deal with fits headers at all you just analyze your data and exotic and exotic makes the output files that you have to upload yourself directly to the AVSO for you it makes this text file with all the information in the format that you need that you can then upload to the AVSO so we really try to take a lot of the hard work out of it for you yeah Paul Dexter is asking do you avoid certain types of stars in your observations like binary stars we try to avoid variable stars in our observations because again these are all differential measurements so if the star is varying over time even over a few hours or few months or few years we want to not use those stars for analysis so we're actually using and leveraging the AVSO themselves through their plugin to identify non-variable stars in the field and actually do absolute flux calibrations as well and that's all done automatically for you through exotic John Martin called in to the Solar System Ambassador presentation that you gave last Friday and has checked out a data set so thank you for participating and wants to know how to handle discrepancies or questions in or with the checked out data set I'm assuming the answer is to contact us on Slack yep feel free to elaborate on that on our Slack channel and let us know fantastic uh Pam Whitwell wants to know if they can use a wedge on their alt as and yeah you can probably use a polar alignment wedge and see how well that works on the tracking again the tracking just might not be as good as a straight-up equatorial mount so you might have to nudge the star back with the field every few hours the grithium and equatorial mount is typically set and forget it and you know taking that few are so bold while your telescope is observing cool Mariah Contreras is asking about using an 11 inch Celestron with an equatorial mount and a ZWO camera is there anything else you would advise to procure for this it was probably on me right sounds like you have all you need you have the equatorial mount the camera the telescope you actually have a relatively large scope which is great so really just we have an observing guide or recommendation on our website we also linked on our website Dennis Conti's guide to exoplanet transit observations and we also have tons of very helpful people on our website and our Slack that are more than happy to help so if you have any questions about how to do the observations or you know if you're writing to any issues please let us know and no worries Steve have to answer both your questions yeah and then Jeff I think answered that as well yeah Brad wants to know if you can use a partial transit if the weather interferes with transit before it's complete yep partial transits are extremely helpful as well so my partial transit that means that you're only able to get like me the first half of the second half of the transit that's not a big deal we'll accept any data that you can get for us even partial transits are extremely helpful because we're getting out to the next phase now that we have tons of data thanks to all of our awesome observers out there we're going to start combining the data the data together and phasing it together to make one single light curve per target so just like what we did for this 80606 observation second we call it that plot up we are able to we're looking now to combine partial observations of a transit and combine them together to get a very nice phase together combine together light curve as well oh i'm going to skip down to chris's question because this is really important at the end of the night is an individual observers data a series of tiff images i believe they're fits images aren't they uh yeah so typically we need the fits images um because we need the metadata that's the information inside the image files so if you're using if your camera can only give you tiff images let us know and we can take a look and see if we can add that functionality and expand that into exotic as well um so that's on the observer's side but then once you use a data analysis code such as a ij ash for image j or exotic perhaps or whatever you want to use what will be spit out at the end of the day is basically a text file the time series that measure the flux of your transit measurement versus time great i think brenda is a second question about an unfiltered time series since transit timing seems the most important part here no photometric filters are needed would filtered observations be more valuable uh we will accept data on whatever mode you can take for us so if you have a specific photometric filter that you really like or if there's another one that you really want to use or if you don't have filters it's not a big deal um exotic is flexible enough um so that you can actually run it for any photometric filter but like you said brad um we care for a lot of this science mostly the timing measurements and while photometric filters are great because they could potentially tell you about different information about different wavelengths of light for the planet's atmosphere i'm not really convinced that anything less than you know a meter and a half telescope class telescope has the precision necessary to really see anything at the atmosphere so unfortunately i don't think we have the precision to really say anything much about the planet atmospheric characterization but this is where all of these small telescopes really are have the boat to shine so if you find for example that your neck of the woods then our filter is the best thing to use because there's a nearby light or the moon is out go ahead and use it or if you find that the v-band filter is what gives you the best signals noise go ahead and use that too it's whatever makes works the best for you great someone's asking how often you should take a fits file uh you should be taking a fits file for every single observation so i didn't know that the z-w planetary cameras take avi videos i believe they also have a feature to take the fits image instead they are also getting confused with the exact z-w o camera that we have as well um we don't have the support right now to turn an avi into a lecker we really at least right now need those fits files for exotic to work and paul's asking for the barcode again so i'll put that up but also a reminder i can never remember barcodes and just in case anything changes just google nasa exoplanet watch for this as well that's the best way to get our information on there and i'll check the chat as well to see um let's see jeff is asking me to field derotator on the alt as you do not use need to use a field derotator all exotic will automatically align all of your images for you you don't have to worry about that at all so you can have your field rotate you can have a pure flip it doesn't matter exotic has the code in hand to um to do the analysis for you yes you do want to go ahead and show the website now uh you let me just check the chat again to make sure there's no other questions that i've missed all right looks like it and we have about five minutes left so i'll quickly just show you our website so again what i do because i can never remember urls is i just type into google nasa exoplanet watch and we should be the very first emit or the very first link that pops up here click on that you know go to our awesome website on here we have a nice link that rachel put at the very top of the page to join our slack channel if you click on this you can join our slack workspace for free and this is basically a chat client so you can all interact more easily not only with the jpl exoplanet watch team but also our other helpful members as well so if you have any questions um if you're you know running into issues with exotic with analyzing your data or taking your observations you can ask in one of us or one of our other friendly users we'll get back to you as well we also have lots of helpful links on here such as how to participate in our projects such as getting involved if you are an amateur astronomer and have your own telescope we have a guide an observer's manual on how to set up your telescope with recommendations there's also this great practical guide for excellent observations by Dennis Conti um and if you don't have your own telescope you can also do our data request system as well so you can actually click the link here you don't have a telescope and this will take you to our data checkout system at the bottomless page you fill out your email address and you prove you're not a robot apparently i'm not a robot that's scary that it knew that already and you submit this and hopefully in a few minutes um sometimes if our email system is a little overwhelmed by all the requests it could take a few hours but typically on the order of a few minutes if not seconds you'll get a link to one of these awesome micro-observatory data sets taken by this telescope right here in the Cecilia Telescope in Tucson and this will be emailed directly to your inbox um then the next step after you get your data either by observing it or requesting your observation oh i mean actually go on you actually uh if you have your own telescope there's this helpful plugin on what to observe after all these uh these potential recommended targets for calendars for the night we also have a plugin with a swathmore transit finder uh website and on here are the exoplanet watch targets the recommended targets that we request our users to observe again you can observe any target you want well let's pretend i wanted when it wasn't cloudy out here to observe from southern california i would just select the exoplanet watch target list i would then go to my location on the world palomar's pretty close to me i would do it for the next day and i could submit this in a few seconds this will return to me right here the potential targets that i could be observing at my location on the earth so here uh folks on the west coast where it's not cloudy you observe coro 18 or was 43 and this will give you lots of helpful information such as the v mag the start and the end of the transits the duration the timing when bjd uh the elevation the percentage of transit also has plugins for things like the air mass plot which is extremely helpful for planning your observations tells you when the transit's occurring and what altitude the transit will be at that given night and there's also a latin plug-ins with sim bad so you can also see star charts as well again though if you don't have your own telescope or you can request data from us but then the next step is to analyze your own data and this can be done on any data analysis tool you want a ij is a very popular one out there but we also have our own called exotic we've been spending a lot of time and effort to make it exotic as user friendly as possible to run on your computer so most users actually run exotic through the google colab cloud so you can actually click for example this beginner tutorial and take a look at that um what this is doing is this is literally hooking up with one of google's cloud computing and you're running all the code on that through your google username so i've signed in here through my jpl account for google you can use any google account you want they're free you can download as many as you want or make as many as you want doesn't really matter but we have instructions on the tutorial on this with lots of helpful instructions um there's also estimates of how long will take the time is basically click these little play buttons to um just run the code and it's as simple as doing on this beginner version three steps the standard version that most users will be running from micro observatory data i think is four steps and then those of you who have your own telescopes you'll be using the advanced version of exotic and that takes about only about four or five steps you might have to identify your filter that you're using or uh type in some information for your star chart but what you're basically doing is we're now downloading exotic to one of those google colab computer clouds and we're installing everything in the cloud so you don't need to run anything or install anything under a computer you can actually run this on your smartphone i've tested it i've actually run exotic or sampled data on our smartphone so if you don't have a nice computer or a new computer or if you only have a chromebook or only have a cell phone you can still fully participate in this project even through the data checkout system as well then what you do is you can watch a video you can then look at your star chart to identify the coordinates of your star in your image i'll kind of skip through this super quickly but basically we have these avias so um find your charts built in to help you find where your star is in your image i've cheated and i've done this before so i know where they are you type in your star target star coordinates type in your comparison star coordinates and then it sets up exotic it tells it what to run and then you run exotic and then exotic will chug through analyze all of your data super quickly and then as little as four minutes you'll get your final light curve out and we'll see that in a second once this is done running so ran through the sample data and there's your light curve so this is basically the same steps that you need to do to analyze your micro observatory light code uh light curve for data william's asking q and a what sort of discoveries have been made using the data we've collected so far the biggest thing we've done so far is by stating about three hours of james web time on hd80606b that's kind of a big deal because depending on how you count about an hour of time on james web is worth about a million dollars so if nasa wants to cut me a check for three million dollars i would gladly take that that'll be awesome um brad is asking how can we try out exotic just go on our website again um so the best way to find that is let me share my screen again it's just by going to our website so just google nasa axle planet watch and click on exotic right here and that'll pop right up on how to use it i recommend everyone starts the beginner tutorial regardless of how much of a pro you are a data analysis then graduate up to the standard and to be advanced if you have your own system iranid is asking if they have an eight inch celestial on and are in the process of getting a camera what would you recommend as best for this type of observation it kind of depends on your budget honestly and what you want to buy so i would definitely hop on our slack channel you can just post this exact same question on there and tons of amateurs can hop on and give you their two cents worth and let you know what sort of cameras they have used and have been successfully using as well and then brad is asking about bend with needs of exotic it's pretty low bend with you if you use the exotic on the colab cloud the only downside to running on the cloud is you need to get your observations your data into your g drive account if you have zero space in your g drive account just make a new one that's the easiest way to do that is just to make a brand new one with all that space because they're free you can make as many as you want the bandwidth whereas is pretty low if you can also copy and directly paste the images we get you over the google colab cloud as well so i don't think the bandwidths are actually that bad you can also run exotic locally on your machine we actually have a way for you to run the code completely locally so if you do have them with issues or data capped internet you can still follow your running exotic on your own computer it runs really well on linux and max systems windows it's a little bit more clunkier unfortunately to run it on because bill gates i guess has some issue with python sometimes or i don't know really but if you're running issues just let us know and we're happy to step you through that process and then gregory is asking how often should you take a fits file with a zwo camera one minute two minutes it depends on the brightness of your star we want to make sure that you do not saturate or fill those pixel well depths on your target or your comparison stars so if your pixel well depth can hold 60 000 counts we typically recommend that folks fill about half their pixel well depth so about 30 000 counts and you want to do that for your target star and your comparison star so it really depends on the saturation limit of your telescope and your camera how big your camera it is and also the brightness of your target star and host star as well i'm just checking the chat again yes and i think that is all the time we have and all the questions we have as well we're right just a couple minutes past the top of the hour and and you know this is fantastic thank you so much rob and rachel for joining us this evening and thank you everyone for tuning in and so you go this webinar along with many others on the night sky network website in the outreach resources section each webinars page also features additional resources and activities we'll post tonight's presentation on the night sky networks page here in the next day or so it should already be on the youtube channel and then join us for our next webinar it's kind of interesting you said that rob that you were involved some to some extent with the nancy grace roman telescope on tuesday march 21st we're having uh brandon lotton from space telescope science institute who's going to tell us all about the nancy grace roman space telescope which is scheduled to launch in 2027 so it's not that far off not really but uh so thank you everyone for joining us and keep looking up and thanks again for having us really really appreciate it this was great i think we uh you know we i think we set a record for the number of the questions that were addressed of course uh you know we started off uh quite early but these were great questions thank you everyone who's still out there for uh posing all those that there was uh i learned a lot