Proposal #548

I am proposing the observation of 11 known exoplanet transits before November 15, 2024.
I have been teaching a course on exoplanets at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, since 2013. During each offering of the course, students are asked to acquire a time series of images bracketing a known exoplanet’s transit, so that they can get the experience of planning, acquiring, and analysing astronomical data. The students construct light curves using their observations by the end of the fall term.
In previous course offerings, students would access the Exoplanet Transit Database (http://var2.astro.cz/ETD/), select a transit of a 10th to 13th magnitude star that was observable using the Athabasca University Robotic Telescope (AURT; 0.37m aperture; https://augo.athabascau.ca/information/aurt/), program the run of observations using the Skynet robotic telescope network (https://skynet.unc.edu/), then download the images (approximately 150 60-second exposures). Typical transit observations would include 30 images pre- and post- transit, with minute-long images during the transit itself. AURT was recently de-commissioned due to funding constraints. I am planning to modify this student project around the hope of acquiring similar data from AAVSOnet.
If successful, I would coordinate with AAVSOnet to specify windows for the transits, then provide the raw data to students for their projects.
Thanks,
Stefan