This time I attempted to detect a different transit of another star using two different setups on the grounds of Hopewell Observatory in northern Virginia.

1. A Canon 6D DSLR mounted on a big, heavy 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on a very sturdy AP1600GTO equatorial mount
2. An alt-az Seestar S50 all-in-one astro camera

Can you spot where the exoplanet TOI-1259-b dimmed the light from its host star?

(Hint: this is a trick question!)

Here are the graphs I made from the data I collected:

Was it at A? Or did it happen at B? (Trick question!)

And this graph is what I got from my SeestarS50:

Psst:

Point A in the first graph was when I reduced the exposure time on the camera from 2 minutes to 30 seconds. That caused all of the fluxes to decrease, because cutting the time by 4 reduces the number of photons captured. Arrow B points to where the transit was supposed to happen, with a 2.7% decrease in brightness.

Do you see it?

Me neither.

In the second graph, done by the Seestar at the same location on the same night, smoothed as much as I can by averaging successive images, I again don’t see much evidence of a 2.7% dip in total flux.

Conclusion: chasing exoplanet transits looks like it could be easy, but it’s not.

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This graph here is no better.

And here is where I extracted just the two green channels:

No, I am not at all convinced that my measurements captured anything.