Extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for K2, TESS and beyond
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS, launched early 2018) is expected to find a multitude of new transiting planet candidates around the nearest and brightest stars. Timely high-precision follow-up observations from the ground are essential in confirming and further characterizing the pl...
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ftdatacite:10.48550/arxiv.1808.02187 2023-05-15T15:15:50+02:00 Extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for K2, TESS and beyond Stefansson, Gudmundur Mahadevan, Suvrath Wisniewski, John Li, Yiting Maney, Marissa Hebb, Leslie Morris, Brett Halverson, Samuel Monson, Andrew Robertson, Paul 2018 https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1808.02187 https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.02187 unknown arXiv arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM Earth and Planetary Astrophysics astro-ph.EP FOS Physical sciences Preprint Article article CreativeWork 2018 ftdatacite https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1808.02187 2022-04-01T09:10:19Z The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS, launched early 2018) is expected to find a multitude of new transiting planet candidates around the nearest and brightest stars. Timely high-precision follow-up observations from the ground are essential in confirming and further characterizing the planet candidates that TESS will find. However, achieving extreme photometric precisions from the ground is challenging, as ground-based telescopes are subject to numerous deleterious atmospheric effects. Beam-shaping diffusers are emerging as a low-cost technology to achieve hitherto unachievable differential photometric precisions from the ground. These diffusers mold the focal plane image of a star into a broad and stable top-hat shape, minimizing photometric errors due to non-uniform pixel response, atmospheric seeing effects, imperfect guiding, and telescope-induced variable aberrations seen in defocusing. In this paper, we expand on our previous work (Stefansson et al. 2017; Stefansson et al. 2018 [submitted]), providing a further detailed discussion of key guidelines when sizing a diffuser for use on a telescope. Furthermore, we present our open source Python package iDiffuse which can calculate the expected PSF size of a diffuser in a telescope system, along with its expected on-sky diffuser-assisted photometric precision for a host star of a given magnitude. We use iDiffuse to show that most ($\sim$80\%) of the planet hosts that TESS will find will be scintillation limited in transit observations from the ground. Although iDiffuse has primarily been developed to plan challenging transit observations using the diffuser on the ARCTIC imager on the ARC 3.5m Telescope at Apache Point observatory, iDiffuse is modular and can be easily extended to calculate the expected diffuser-assisted photometric precisions on other telescopes. : 16 pages, 7 Figures, Submitted to SPIE, Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation Report Arctic DataCite Metadata Store (German National Library of Science and Technology) Arctic Stefansson ENVELOPE(-62.417,-62.417,-69.467,-69.467) |
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DataCite Metadata Store (German National Library of Science and Technology) |
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unknown |
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM Earth and Planetary Astrophysics astro-ph.EP FOS Physical sciences |
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Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM Earth and Planetary Astrophysics astro-ph.EP FOS Physical sciences Stefansson, Gudmundur Mahadevan, Suvrath Wisniewski, John Li, Yiting Maney, Marissa Hebb, Leslie Morris, Brett Halverson, Samuel Monson, Andrew Robertson, Paul Extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for K2, TESS and beyond |
topic_facet |
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM Earth and Planetary Astrophysics astro-ph.EP FOS Physical sciences |
description |
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS, launched early 2018) is expected to find a multitude of new transiting planet candidates around the nearest and brightest stars. Timely high-precision follow-up observations from the ground are essential in confirming and further characterizing the planet candidates that TESS will find. However, achieving extreme photometric precisions from the ground is challenging, as ground-based telescopes are subject to numerous deleterious atmospheric effects. Beam-shaping diffusers are emerging as a low-cost technology to achieve hitherto unachievable differential photometric precisions from the ground. These diffusers mold the focal plane image of a star into a broad and stable top-hat shape, minimizing photometric errors due to non-uniform pixel response, atmospheric seeing effects, imperfect guiding, and telescope-induced variable aberrations seen in defocusing. In this paper, we expand on our previous work (Stefansson et al. 2017; Stefansson et al. 2018 [submitted]), providing a further detailed discussion of key guidelines when sizing a diffuser for use on a telescope. Furthermore, we present our open source Python package iDiffuse which can calculate the expected PSF size of a diffuser in a telescope system, along with its expected on-sky diffuser-assisted photometric precision for a host star of a given magnitude. We use iDiffuse to show that most ($\sim$80\%) of the planet hosts that TESS will find will be scintillation limited in transit observations from the ground. Although iDiffuse has primarily been developed to plan challenging transit observations using the diffuser on the ARCTIC imager on the ARC 3.5m Telescope at Apache Point observatory, iDiffuse is modular and can be easily extended to calculate the expected diffuser-assisted photometric precisions on other telescopes. : 16 pages, 7 Figures, Submitted to SPIE, Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation |
format |
Report |
author |
Stefansson, Gudmundur Mahadevan, Suvrath Wisniewski, John Li, Yiting Maney, Marissa Hebb, Leslie Morris, Brett Halverson, Samuel Monson, Andrew Robertson, Paul |
author_facet |
Stefansson, Gudmundur Mahadevan, Suvrath Wisniewski, John Li, Yiting Maney, Marissa Hebb, Leslie Morris, Brett Halverson, Samuel Monson, Andrew Robertson, Paul |
author_sort |
Stefansson, Gudmundur |
title |
Extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for K2, TESS and beyond |
title_short |
Extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for K2, TESS and beyond |
title_full |
Extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for K2, TESS and beyond |
title_fullStr |
Extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for K2, TESS and beyond |
title_full_unstemmed |
Extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for K2, TESS and beyond |
title_sort |
extreme precision photometry from the ground with beam-shaping diffusers for k2, tess and beyond |
publisher |
arXiv |
publishDate |
2018 |
url |
https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1808.02187 https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.02187 |
long_lat |
ENVELOPE(-62.417,-62.417,-69.467,-69.467) |
geographic |
Arctic Stefansson |
geographic_facet |
Arctic Stefansson |
genre |
Arctic |
genre_facet |
Arctic |
op_rights |
arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1808.02187 |
_version_ |
1766346168791465984 |