Dr. Timothy Brown, STARE, TrES data

[The Meal]

Not sure if I'm placing this in the right forum or not, please feel free to move as appropriate.

I sat through Dr. Tim Brown's presentation on the Transient Method for detecting Extra-Solar planets during last night's Longmont Astronomical Society meeting last night (a reference to this work can be found here). As part of his presentation Dr. Brown pointed out that his 6º x 6º fields generally containing 10,000 to 20,000 R=12 or brighter stars, collected on both sides of the Atlantic are generally underutilized, scientifically. I, of course, immediately thought of the CONCAM data and wondered what sort of correlations could be utilized between the two datasets.

Now I haven't spent nearly as much time thinking about these things as the NSL researchers have, but I wanted to make sure that you folks knew of the existence of this data and whether you could find this generally useful for your own nefarious purposes.

In a very funny (and appropriate to my post, here) moment, Dr. Brown was asked for the URL to his research. He told to crowd to Google STARE, TrES, et al. I immediately cracked an Einstein phone-number joke. The space.com was one of the first URLs I came across when I ran my own search -- I have no idea where the actual data is located.

~Neal

[RJN]

Hi Neal,
I think the STARE home page is: http://www.hao.ucar.edu/public/research ... stare.html
I am not very familiar with it but it looks like an interesting project. They have a field of view of about 6 degrees, compared with 180 degrees for the NSL CONCAMs. Therefore they are able to see a smaller part of the sky deeper than NSL. With large telescopes with small fields of view like Keck on the large end, and small arrays of CONCAMs viewing the whole sky on the other end, STARE is in the middle.

The STARE group is trying to find planets occulting their parent stars. We don't think there are enough stars visible to CONCAM3s to do this with NSL data. We don't expect the CONCAM3B now being built to get to this goal either. Possibly the CONCAM4 being built by the Israeli group could get there. Monitoring bright stars for planets and comets is a long term goal of this project.

- RJN

[The Meal]

Thanks, Dr. Nemiroff. I understood the different goals of the projects (I was unaware of the longterm NSL goals, however), but thought the STARE dataset could be "unintentionally" useful to your own efforts, say correlation of magnitudes (or any other multitude of things I hadn't considered). Glad to have done my part as a scietific lay-person and made you aware of some other potentially useful/interesting science out there.

~Neal