===================================================================== VITAL STATISTICS OF A TRANSIT SEARCH PROGRAMME ===================================================================== From: Przemyslaw R. Wozniak Subject: Planet transits in ROTSE and RAPTOR Prof. Bohdan Paczynski, my former PhD advisor, pointed out to me that ROTSE and RAPTOR are not on your list of projects for the review of planetary transit searches. I'd like to mention the work I am involved in, which I think is relevant and you may find interesting. I am currently processing ROTSE-I all sky data and we are achieving 1% accuracy for stars in 8-12 mag range, although 8-10 mag range is frequently affected by saturation. ROTSE-I database will cover all sky in 8-15.5 mag range with up to 350 epochs near the North pole (or 700 counting pairs of adjacent frames as two). Near the south limit at DEC=-35 deg the number of epochs is much lower, 40-60 or so. This material is not optimal for planet transits, but I think it may still hide a few of them. Our planned experiments are of even better potential. ROTSE-III is going much deeper to almost 18 mag in 60 seconds, and has some fast cadence photometry in plans. Carl Akerlof from Michigan is the PI of that project. Tom Vestrand is also familiar with all details and is a "local PI" for LANL. A new independent project at LANL is RAPTOR, a Rapid Telescope for Optical Response with Tom Vestrand as a PI. This project starts small on hardware, but its main strength is real time data analysis pipeline, self follow-up of wide field observations (40x40 deg) with much narrower field but more sensitive detector, and stereoscopic observations with 2 telescopes 38 km apart. With 60 second cadence we can get to about 12.5-13.0 mag in wide field and 15.5 mag in 4x4 deg field. ===================================================================== Updated: 2002.06.10