Exoplanets and the VO

[John Murrell]

Hi everyone,

 

Exoplanets are always a popular subject with people wanting to see the latest or most Earth like discoveries.  There are several ways of finding the location of the exoplanet on the sky including typing in the co-ordinates to your mount manually. As the extra solar encyclopaedia which holds the locations of the known exoplanets is Virtual Observatory(VO)  compatible it is a fairly easy and much quicker to use the VO to send the data to TopCat to allow you to select the particular Exoplanet you are interested in, selecting the appropriate object in TopCat then sends the location to Cartes du Ciel (CdC) and finally CdC sends the location to your telescope via ASCOM and your telescope should slew to the correct position. One Click exoplanet finding when you have set it up.

 

As the data is in TopCat you can use this to plot all sky views or whatever is informative from the data. It is interesting to plot the Kepler field – there is an image on the page below but if you try this yourself you can do things like plot the mass of the Exoplanet in colour.

 

I have documented the method on a new page on my website at http://www.johnmurrell.org.uk/AVO-Exoplanets.htm . A similar method can also be used for any of the objects in the catalogues in Vizier as this is also able to transmit the data table using the VO to TopCat.

 

Good Viewing

 

John Murrell