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After a few tries, that were used mainly to refine procedures and test practices, finally, my first exoplanet light curve! The data was captured on the night from September 13 to 14, 2008, in the UFObservatory, Portugal, with a Celestron C8 and a Atik 314L (full details soon) guided by a Losmandy G11. It was a full moon, and the transparency wasn’t very good, but the night had the purpose to setup piers III and IV at the (still under construction) UFObservatory. Pier II (mine) was already setup, aligned, and ready to image, and this exoplanet was used to perform technical first light for the instruments.

Capture started at 2008/09/13 22h49m44s UT and the last frame is time-stamped 2008/09/14 2h26m31s UT, covering a little more than 3.5 hours. The ephemerides for this transit (from www.transitsearch.org) predicted beginning of transit at 2008/09/13 23h53 UT (JD 2454723.50) ending at 2008/09/14 1h35 UT (JD2454723.57). The scattering on the measurements is very high, much more than I expected, and will have to be further investigated, but for now I’m blaming it on improper calibration (I didn’t captured flat frames for the sequence) and poor guiding. RA guiding was very acceptable, but Gemini often displayed a “DEC motor lags” message. Both RA and DEC motors were examined but there’s was no sign of binding on the worms, so next session is going to be monitored with a voltmeter, to make sure the power supply is functioning properly.