New results from the first exoplanet survey in the Canadian High Arctic

We present new results from the first search for transiting exoplanets undertaken from the High Arctic: the AWCam (Arctic Wide-field Cameras) survey. The survey, which has been operating for 2.5 years, is based at 80 degrees North on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic. The small telescopes...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:SPIE Proceedings, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes V
Main Authors: Law, Nicholas M., Carlberg, Raymond, Fors, Octavi, Steinbring, Eric, Ngan, Wayne, Wulfken, Philip, Pedersen, Bjorn, Maire, Jerome, Sivanandam, Suresh
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: SPIE 2014
Subjects:
Airborne telescopes
Cameras
Extrasolar planets
Photometry
Stars
Turbulent flow
arctic
circumpolar
Exoplanet
Site-testing
transit
Wide field cameras
Arctic
Ellesmere Island
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2057009
https://nrc-publications.canada.ca/eng/view/object/?id=1b1f0f62-0f0b-4f7d-9f67-186f20c95832
https://nrc-publications.canada.ca/fra/voir/objet/?id=1b1f0f62-0f0b-4f7d-9f67-186f20c95832
Description
Summary:We present new results from the first search for transiting exoplanets undertaken from the High Arctic: the AWCam (Arctic Wide-field Cameras) survey. The survey, which has been operating for 2.5 years, is based at 80 degrees North on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic. The small telescopes monitor 70,000 bright stars in a several-hundred square-degree region around Polaris, with milli-magnitude photometric precision, and are capable of discovering giant planets around 10,000 bright, nearby solar-type stars. We present the first longterm monitoring results from the AWCams, including an assessment of the site characteristics and the systems' long-term performance. The High-Arctic site provided excellent survey efficiency, without diurnal windowing and largely uninterrupted by clouds. Useful data was obtained over the entire survey field 71% of the time; the sky was clear 62% of the time. One pristine clear, dark period in winter 2012/13 persisted for 480 hours. In 2012/13 we recorded a period of 480 hours of continuous photometric conditions, attaining 3-4 millimag photometric stability over the entire period. We report the long-term photometric performance of the AWCam systems and detail the discovery of a bright (V=8) low-amplitude eclipsing binary. Finally, we present a concept for an extremely-wide-field arctic survey based on the Evryscope telescope-array design. Peer reviewed: Yes NRC publication: Yes

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