System Description and First Light Curves of the Hungarian Automated Telescope, an Autonomous Observatory for Variability Search

By Gáspár Á. Bakos, J. Lázár, István Papp, P. Sári, E. Green. 2002

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Having been operational at Kitt Peak for more than a year, the prototype (HAT‐1) of the Hungarian Automated Telescope (HAT) has been used for an all‐sky variability search of the northern hemisphere. This small autonomous observatory is recording the brightness of stars in the range of IC ≈ 6–13 mag with a telephoto lens and its 9° × 9° field of view, yielding a data rate of ∼106 photometric measurements per night. We give brief hardware and software descriptions of the system, controlled by a single PC running RealTime Linux OS. We provide an overview of site‐specific details and quantify the astrometric and photometric capabilities of HAT. As a demonstration of system performance, we give a sample of 60 short‐period variables in a single selected field, all bright, with I<13 mag, where only 14 were known before. Depending on the observing strategy, a search for extrasolar planet transits is also a feasible observing program. We conclude with a short discussion on future directions. Further information can be found at the HAT Web page.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd51b97dd2a95a69057c46f2b1d42a3584e87530

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Citations in the corpus

Homogeneous studies of transiting extrasolar planets - III. Additional planets and stellar models (2010, methodology): “HAT-P-1 was found to be a TEP by Bakos et al. (2007a) from data taken by the HAT survey (Bakos et al. 2002, 2004).”
Wide‐Field Millimagnitude Photometry with the HAT: A Tool for Extrasolar Planet Detection (2004, methodology): “In order to make HAT suitable for extrasolar giant planet transit detection, and to improve our precision, several hardware modifications were performed on the prototype HAT-1 system (Bakos et al. 2002).”
Rejecting Astrophysical False Positives from the TrES Transiting Planet Survey: The Example of GSC 03885–00829 (2006, background): “The TrES campaign, together with other wide–field surveys such as the HAT network (Bakos et al. 2002) and SuperWASP (Street et al. 2003), are monitoring thousands of nearby bright stars (9 ≤ V ≤ 13).”
THE XO PLANETARY SURVEY PROJECT: ASTROPHYSICAL FALSE POSITIVES (2010, unknown): “…from the XO project (McCullough et al. 2005), and because the characteristics of that survey are similar to other transit surveys such as HAT (Bakos et al. 2002), WASP (Pollacco et al. 2006), TrES (Dunham et al. 2004), some of the results may be helpful to avoid redundant observations for…”
ORBITAL PHASE VARIATIONS OF THE ECCENTRIC GIANT PLANET HAT-P-2b (2013, background): “The supermassive (Mp = 9 MJ) Jupiter sized (Rp = 1 RJ) planet HAT-P-2b (aka HD 147506b) was first discovered from transit observations by Bakos et al. (2007b) using the HATNet (Bakos et al. 2002, 2004) network of ground-based telescopes.”
DISCOVERY OF A TRANSITING PLANET AND EIGHT ECLIPSING BINARIES IN HATNet FIELD G205 (2009, background): “The HATNet telescopes HAT-5, HAT-6, HAT-8, and HAT9 (HATNet; Bakos et al. 2002, 2004) observed HATNet field G205, centered at α = 22h56m, δ = +37◦30′, on a nightly basis between 2003 September 29 and 2004 February 1, and between 2006 July 3 and 2006 July 24.”
HAT-P-7b: An Extremely Hot Massive Planet Transiting a Bright Star in the Kepler Field (2008, background): “The HATNet telescopes HAT-7 and HAT-8 (HATNet; Bakos et al. 2002, 2004) observed HATNet field G154, centered at α = 19h12m, δ = +45◦00′, on a near-nightly basis from 2004 May 27 to 2004 August 6.”
HAT-P-11b: A SUPER-NEPTUNE PLANET TRANSITING A BRIGHT K STAR IN THE KEPLER FIELD (2009, background): “One of the wide-field surveys involved in the detection of TEP’s is the HATNet survey (Bakos et al. 2002, 2004), which currently operates 6 small fully-automated 13 Of course, the first and most prominent one being HD 209458b (Charbonneau et al. 2000; Henry et al. 2000). wide-field telescopes.”
HD 147506b: A Supermassive Planet in an Eccentric Orbit Transiting a Bright Star (2007, background): “It was initially identified as a transit candidate in our internally labeled field G193 in the data obtained by HATNet’s14 (Bakos et al. 2002, 2004) HAT-6 telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO).”