Abstract
We present the prototype telescope for the Next Generation Transit
Survey, which was built in the UK in 2008/2009 and tested on La Palma in
the Canary Islands in 2010. The goals for the prototype system were
severalfold: to determine the level of systematic noise in an NGTS-like
system; demonstrate that we can perform photometry at the (sub)
millimagnitude level on transit timescales across a wide-field; show
that it is possible to detect transiting super-Earth and Neptune-sized
exoplanets and prove the technical feasibility of the proposed planet
survey. We tested the system for around 100 nights and met each of the
goals above. Several key areas for improvement were highlighted during
the prototyping phase. They have been subsequently addressed in the
final NGTS facility, which was recently commissioned at ESO Cerro
Paranal, Chile.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 25002 |
Journal | Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific |
Volume | 129 |
Issue number | 972 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 01 Feb 2017 |