SUNSET: 
0
Photographer:
JML_Astrophotos
Location of Photo:
Greenwood, South Carolina, USA
Date/Time of photo:
October 6, 2024
Equipment:
Celestron 9.25" SCT, Canon EOS Ra, Radian Triad Ultra filter, Orion Atlas II mount
Description:
WASP-33b, along with most known exoplanets, crosses in front of it’s host star in an event called a “transit”. These transits, like eclipses on Earth, block a little bit of the starlight from reaching Earth. In WASP-33b’s case, the percentage of light it blocks (the transit “depth”), is just 1.2%. That difference is far too slight for the eye to notice, but cameras can with a technique called “photometry”. To accomplish that feat, I took over 300 photos of the star over the roughly 3 hour transit, then used the HOPS program to quantify the brightness of the star in each photo, compared to nearby reference stars. The result is this graph, called a “light curve”, shown below a separate photo of WASP-33 and neighboring stars. -Jeff Lesperance @jml.astrophotos
