Events - Event View

Speaker:  Dr. Rick Schwarz, DVAA Member

"The TESS Mission: How Citizen Astronomers Are Making A Difference."

"My collaborator, Harvey Patashnick, and I use a fully robotic, state of the art private observatory with a 0.38 m Newtonian Cassegrain scope, an SBIG ST10 XME CCD Camera, on-axis guiding and and SBIG AO-8 Active Optics System.  Over the past three years, we have recorded exoplanet transits form the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) program, the Kepler K2 Mission, and from the TESS Input Catalog.  We are gearing up for the Northern Ecliptic Hemisphere Survey that will commence this July.  We are approved members of the TESS Follow-Up Observing Program (TFOP) and the Sub Group 1 (Seeing Limited Photometry) consortium.  My talk will give a brief overview of the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Observing Satellite) mission, a description of the TFOP program, show some exoplanet transit observation data that we have generated at our observatory, and explain what is required and how to get involved - TFOP SG1 is looking for more members!"