On the night of UT Mar 14, 2008, the SDSS Photometric Telescope ("PT" for short) took a series of exposures of TrES-3. We detected an entire transit. The transit is (as usual with this system) briefer than the ephemeris predicts.
Notes from the night
This is a chart of the field. TrES-3 orbits the is the bright star indicated by the crosshairs. The star labelled "C" will appear in later graphs.
The host star of TrES-3 has a magnitude V=12.40 according to TrES-3: A Nearby, Massive, Transiting Hot Jupiter in a 31-Hour Orbit .
Following the procedures outlined by Kent Honeycutt's article on inhomogeneous ensemble photometry, I used all stars available in each image to define a reference frame, and measured each star against this frame. You can find the software package used to do the ensemble photometry online; it's free!
The night was not good. The graph below shows the amount by which instrumental magnitudes from each image needed to be shifted to match the ensemble reference. On a clear night, this graph would show a straight horizontal line.
Below is a graph of the scatter in differential magnitude versus magnitude in the ensemble solution.
TrES-3 is the star at differential mag 1.38. it shows a very small excess of scatter than neighboring stars of the same brightness. The "noise floor" in these measurements is about 0.006 mag -- not good at all. Many of the outliers in the plot above are real variable stars (which were removed from the ensemble solution).
Below are the light curves for the target (green symbols) and four comparison stars in the field. I also show the light curve of one of the variables, which is at (J2000) 17:52:12.0, +37:39:07, with USNO B2.0 magnitudes B=14.5 and R=13.6.
In this closeup, I have shifted the data for two comparison stars to move them closer in magnitude to the target.
My eyeball estimate for the start of the transit is 539.87, and my estimate for the end is 539.91.
An ephemeris grabbed from transitsearch.org predicts for this night
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Begin Transit Window PREDICTED CENTRAL TRANSIT End Transit Window
All Times UT
HJD Year M D H M
2454539.85 2008 3 14 8 21 2454539.89 2008 3 14 9 18 2454539.93 2008 3 14 10 15
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ephemeris ingress of UT 2008 Mar 14 08:21:00 corresponds to JD 2,454,539.848, which is about considerably EARLIER than the observed ingress. The ephemeris egress of UT 2008 Mar 14 10:15:00 corresponds to JD 2,454,539.927, which is somewhat LATER than the observed egress.
This pattern confirms the indications from earlier nights,
You can grab the measurements for your own analysis. Below is a table with three flavors of time, plus the differential magnitude of the target and an estimate of the uncertainty in each measurement. I show the first few lines of the file to give you an idea of its format.
# Measurements of TrES-3 made with APO PT, Mar 14, 2008 UT. # Each exposure 30 seconds long in SDSS i-band; # Tabulated times are midexposure (FITS header time - half exposure length) # and accurate only to +/- 1 second (??). # 'mag' is a differential magnitude based on ensemble photometry # using a circular aperture of radius 5.25 arcseconds. # # UT day JD-2,450,000 HJD-2,450,000 mag uncert Mar14.82466 4539.82466 4539.82452 1.376 0.006 Mar14.82597 4539.82597 4539.82583 1.382 0.006 Mar14.82731 4539.82731 4539.82717 1.380 0.006
Last modified 03/22/2008 by MWR.