In the Beginning...

Earth's a pretty cool place.  We humans have been able to live here (more or less) happily for a couple hundred thousand years.  But it's not like it's cheating if we look at some other planets, right? No.  And that's exactly what PHATSY wants to do.

The field of Exoplanets has been booming in astronomy recently.  An exoplanet, for those who are super new to the field, is a planet outside of our solar system orbiting its own star.  Humans (especially scifi writers) have been interested in finding other possibly habitable planets for decades, and now the technology to do so has finally arrived!  We exoplanet astronomers have three main methods of finding our targets

1. Transit Method, where we observe the planet passing in front of its host star
2. Radial Velocity, where we look for the wobble of the host star (For a naive undergrad's somewhat mathy explanation of wobble, look here.  Or google it if equations aren't your thing.)
3. Direct Imaging, where we actually take a picture of the planet itself!

It might be a little intuitive that the last method is the most difficult. These planets are pretty far away, after all.  And the second requires really focused observations and, as those of you who followed the link may have seen, math.  So we'll be using the first method.  

cornellcollege.edu

When we look for a transiting exoplanet, we're really trying to see the decrease in the amount of light we receive from the system when the planet passes in front of its star.  Based on this, we can figure out all sorts of cool things like the velocity of the planet, the size of its orbit, the ratio of masses of the planet to its star, etc.  BUT, before we can turn things like Star Trek and Alien Nation into our reality, we have to find a ton of exoplanets.  

And that's where PHATSY comes in. The Planet Harvester Automated Transit Survey in Y (PHATSY) plans to use an array of digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras around the world so that we can constantly be imaging the sky.  Current exoplanet observations are pretty expensive (still in the $100,000 range), but since we're using common cameras that pretty much anyone could buy, our cost-per-unit is way lower.  The idea of using DSLRs for astrophotometry was thought up by Dr. Olivier Guyon of the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics at the University of Arizona.

Currently, our team is comprised of five people. Dr. John Johnson (kind of the Professor X of our group) is a professor at Harvard University who selected all of us to work on this project with him when he moved to Harvard from CalTech last year.  John Lewis is a grad student at Harvard interested in Star Formation in Giant Molecular Clouds.  Nina Hooper is a junior at Harvard studying Astrophysics who spent some time over this past summer getting familiar with our equipment along with the fourth member of our team, Inez Khan. Inez is a high school senior (I know, super impressive!) who's interested in sticking with astronomy.  And finally, Moiya McTier (that's me) is a junior at Harvard studying Astrophysics and Folklore/Mythology who thinks astronomy is really cool, and wants everyone else to think so too.    

That's about it for the short, introductory post.  I promise there will be more posts soon with more background information and detailed accounts of our progress with the project.  See you then!