Photometric Follow-up of Transiting Planet Candidates: Optimization, Automation, and Data Reduction

Abstract

Wide-field photometric survey projects such as HATNet and TESS identify many objects which are potentially exoplanets. In order to confirm these candidates as planets, follow-up observations with higher spatial-resolution and photometric precision are necessary. By virtue of having a higher spatial-resolution, the telescopes used for this follow-up can only view a few candidates in a single night. As a result, members of the HAT team manually select which objects to view and for how long. This process, though successful, is error prone and not as efficient as it could be. Therefore, we set out to optimize the selection of exoplanet candidates and automate the creation of viewing schedules. This automated solution to photometric follow-up scheduling utilizes the downhill simplex method, is fully functional/currently employed, and we anticipate will be generalized and applied to other projects in the future.