Exoplanet observations at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias IAC and its collaboration with the ExoClock project

Introduction

A group of amateur astronomers from the Sabadell Astronomical Society is using small professional telescopes to obtain exoplanets transits photometry for the ExoClock project and ARIEL mission. Contact was taken in 2022 with MuSCAT2 team who uses the Carlos Sánchez Telescope, a telescope of 1.50 m diameter, almost fully dedicated to exoplanet, located in Tenerife. It appeared than that some exoplanet targets were common to MuSCAT2 investigations and ExoClock exoplanet database. This talk will explain how both shared a large number of past transits. As a result, all MuSCAT2 team has been included as co-authors to the IV ExoClock transit data release

 

MuSCAT2 and Carlos Sánchez Telescope project

First, The MuSCAT2 camera, will be described, it allows to obtain simultaneous four channels of observations. It is mounted on the Carlos Sánchez Telescope. The main purpose of MuSCAT2 team is to validate or not the exoplanet candidates published by TESS mission. Once it is validated, the group means to characterize the main parameters of the exoplanet like, radius, mass but also other characteristics.

ExoClock mission

ExoClock purpose is to bring correct ephemeris of interesting exoplanets for the ARIEL space mission, to be launched in 2029. This mission will study exoplanets atmospheres.

 

Collaboration development

Around a hundred of targets are common to both projects. The process to adapt MuSCAT2 transits files to ExoClock database is explained. This was done by a student, Gareb Enoc Fernández Rodríguez, from La Laguna University, with Enric Pallé as a mentor.

The TCS transits information has a specific format, not compatible with ExoClock database, so it was necessary to develop a “pipeline” to do this job. For that, contacts with Angelos from ExoClock were key.

As amateur, I belong to MuSCAT2 team and I observe on the TCS regularly, together with students and professional astronomers. I will describe briefly how the work is organized and what is my job in the collaboration between the IAC, TCS and ExoClock.