On the night of UT June 07, 2008, the SDSS Photometric Telescope ("PT" for short) took a series of exposures of TrES-3. We detected both ingress and egress, at roughly the times predicted.
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 okay. 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 0.74; it shows a small excess of scatter than neighboring stars of the same brightness. The "noise floor" in these measurements is about 0.002 mag -- as small as I've seen. 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.
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 ingress is 624.755, and my estimate for the egress is 624.819.
Justin's notes indicate that ingress should have occurred at 624.762, about 10 minutes later than my eyeball estimate. The egress was predicted to occur at 624.819, about 13 minutes later than my estimate.
The earlier-than-predicted ingress is inconsistent with, but the earlier-than-predicted egress is consistent with, the indications from earlier nights:
However, the differences in time are small enough on this current night that they may be due simply to my eye following a few successive noise fluctuations.
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, Jun 7, 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 Jun07.72233 4624.72233 4624.72513 0.732 0.004 Jun07.72369 4624.72369 4624.72649 0.728 0.004 Jun07.72502 4624.72502 4624.72782 0.732 0.004
Last modified 06/27/2008 by MWR.