Last Sept I gave a TEDx talk on the PEST and my journey in astronomy. It was held in front of a live audience at the beautiful Western Australian Museum ‘Boola Bardip’. Check out the whale skeleton! Read More →
One night 3 weeks ago my CCD camera produced a dud frame. Just noise. But the rest of the night’s observations went normally. The following night it was all noise. Yes, some stars could be seen, but mostly it was ugly. I tried again the following night, in the hope the problem might clear with a restart. Nope. Emails to the SBIG service man, Bill Lynch, were discouraging. The ST-8XME is obsolete and spare parts are virtually non-existent. The last time I sent it back for repair Bill had said the board he put in was the last one he had. SBIG also do aRead More →
50 planet discoveries, that is. The 50th, TOI-564b was announced on arxiv today, a nice Xmas present. A hot Jupiter in a grazing orbit, this discovery makes a nod to the past, and points to the future. The past, because the first exoplanet found, in 1995, was a hot Jupiter. The future because this one was found by TESS, which is likely to dominate discoveries for years to come. As is customary, milestones are occasions for reflection. Back in Oct 2010 PEST was just a plywood shell, and planet discovery was just a dream. Now, the list of PEST co-discoveries includes a diversity ofRead More →
I have now made available the set of programs I use for processing photometry and producing plots and reports, the ‘PEST Pipeline‘. I’ve included an overview, downloads as well as a tutorial. The Pipeline is the result of several years of development, with the TESS project (in particular Karen Collins) driving requirements over the last year. It’s quick and efficient in getting from raw photometric data to plots and reports, mainly because there little fiddling with settings and selections on windows, and lots of standardisation of everything from workflow to file location and naming. I’d like to acknowledge David Motl and his fantastic C-Munipack packageRead More →
The email a few weeks ago said; “Thank you again for publishing with us. As a thank you to our accepted authors, you are invited to receive a one year complimentary personal subscription to Nature.” Now the first copy has arrived on my desk. This may not seem a big deal, but Nature is probably the most prestigious multi-disciplinary science journal in the world – the wave nature of particles, the structure of DNA, nuclear fission and plate tectonics were all first announced in its pages. And I’m receiving it as an author, on publication in Nature Astronomy of the the first TESS planet discoveriesRead More →
TESS launched this week. Not many minutes after lift-off on a SpaceX Falcon 9, it was in space. It will find tens of thousands of new planets, but will need help from the ground. PEST has been gearing up for this support role since March last year.Read More →
There is a new top candidate for the best place to search for life outside our Solar System. Announced in Nature on April 20th 2017, LHS 1140b is a super-Earth in the habitable zone of a nearby small star. This is the story of that discovery and the role PEST played.Read More →
I set PEST up to discover planets. That was the Big Hairy Goal. And because these planets would be mine – all mine – I would be able to call them PEST-1b etc. That would have been seriously cool. It hasn’t worked out that way. The reasons why are instructive.Read More →
Astronomers sometimes blithely talk about ‘bright’ stars. If an exoplanet transits a bright star, we will be able to measure the the parameters of the planet, eg mass and radius to greater precision, and perhaps to sniff its atmosphere. But in everyday terms, how bright are these stars?Read More →
Look through the list of PEST discoveries and ground-based planet searches generally, and you will find plenty of so-called hot Jupiters. Strangely we now know that hot Jupiters are rare. Read More →