Well, this is exciting... Something I wanted to do for a long time - I helped confirm the existence of an exoplanet - that is, a planet that orbits a different star!
This particular planet; WASP 3-b was already confirmed and well established. Still, it's pretty cool amateur astronomers have the tools to do a bit of science. We already know a bit about this exo-planet.
The star it's orbiting is 800 light years from the sun.
The planet itself is a gas giant, 2.4 the size of Jupiter.
It orbits very near to the star and so it is categorized as a Hot Jupiter.
So how does it work? With the Transit method, what we're looking for is the tiny dimming of the star when the planet passes between it and our point of view here on Earth. We then take calculated exposures and measure the light output deviations.
We're hoping that the data taken matches the expected model as seen from other observations.
As you can see from the plot, even though my data (in red) is not that good, it still matches very well with the expected model.
The picture is not of the planet of course, but of the host star. I didn't make a lot of effort to make it look nice but it's good enough.
Used HOPS for processing:
https://www.exoworldsspies.com/en/software/Heaps of credit and thanks to PatriotAstro for his amazing tutorials on this and many other astrophotography subjects.
Check out his channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/PatriotAstro
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