Project PANOPTES: Enabling citizen scientists to find exoplanets with affordable technology

The Denver Astronomical Society (DAS) promotes the enjoyment and understanding of astronomical phenomena, history and lore by providing educational and observing opportunities for our members, education to the general public, and outreach activities at the University of Denver's Historic Chamberlin Observatory, schools, and nature centers.

On February 14th, 2014, the Denver Astronomical Society presented Josh Walawender of Project PANOPTES, a citizen science project recruiting people to detect and measure exoplanets from their own backyard with digital cameras. The audio accompanying this video was recorded as part of an earlier lecture given to the Night Sky Network, which includes additional talking points by Dr. Olivier Guyon, Josh Walawender, and Mike Butterfield.

And don't forget to check out the Denver Astronomical Society here.

Dr. Josh Walawender is an astronomer at the 8-meter Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. He earned his bachelors degree at the University of California at Berkeley and his PhD at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Josh's research interests lie in the area of star formation and he has worked extensively on building and operating "small" (0.1 to 1 meter) robotic telescopes. Josh has been an avid amateur astronomer since childhood and still enjoys observing sessions under the Big Island's pristine skies.

The goal of Project PANOPTES (Panoptic Astronomical Networked OPtical observatory for Transiting Exoplanets Survey) is to build low cost, reliable, robotic telescopes which can be used to detect transiting extra-solar planets. PANOPTES is a "citizen science" project in which will involve amateur astronomers, school groups, and others from the community in all aspects of the science: instrument design, instrument construction, data collection, and data analysis. The hardware and software will be open source. The project is depending on members of the community to assemble and deploy their own PANOPTES units in order to build up a global network of telescopes. The hardware is designed to be standardized, using as many commercial off the shelf components as possible so that a PANOPTES "unit" can be reproduced quickly and easily. In this talk Dr. Walawender will describe the current state of PANOPTES and how amateur astronomers can get involved.

The monthly meeting started with a short business meeting, at which time 2014-2015 DAS officers will be elected.

As usual, there was a reception with coffee and other refreshments at Chamberlin Observatory after the meeting, to which all attendees were invited.

[CrossoverManiac]

85-mm f/1.4 Rokinon is iffy. I bought one and it had issues with distorting stars at the center of the lens even though such distortion usually show up closer to the edge of the image in even mediocre lens. I replaced my Rokinon 85 with a Rokinon 135mm and got far better results. From the reviews of the Rokinon lenses, usually the good ones are the ones with no divider line on the focuser like my 135mm while the ones with the divider line like the 85mm are hit-or-miss. So try out your 85mm f/1.4 and be ready to return it just in case. Sigma sells two models of 85-mm f/1.4: the Sigma EX 85mm f/1.4 HSM DG EX is under $1000 brand new if you shop around and the non-art lens model which I only found for sell used so it might be discontinued but if you don't mind used, they're usually between $600 to $800. I also heard Sigma sell good lenses. Try it out if the Rokinon 85 doesn't work out for you.

[CrossoverManiac]

Another concern I have is with your aperature area calculations. Often, amateur astronomers taking pictures with a DSLR lens can't go wide open with their lens less they have distortions like vignetting and coma. It's good to start off with a camera lens with as low of an f-stop as possible so that the lens has a good starting point before being stopping down to something like an f/3.5 or f/4 rather than a lens with a higher f-stop like f-3.5 being stuffed down to f/8 or f/11. So, the aperture area should be calculated after finding the functional f-stop unless you have a plan to deal with the image distortions without stopping down the lens.