Observations on Transits of Exoplanet TrES-1

 Brian Walsh '06

Advisor:  Dr. Tom Balonek

During the summer of 2004, the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey announced the discovery of a new exoplanet which they named TrES-1.  The observations leading to this confirmed existence were limited to 4 full transits and 2 partial ones due to the inability to observe transits when they occur too low in the sky or during the day.  During the Fall of 2004 and Spring of 2005, transits of TrES-1 were monitored through photometry with the 16-inch telescope at the Colgate University Foggy Bottom Observatory (FBO) in Hamilton, New York.  To reduce the data, code was written in the Java programming language to automate the National Institute of Health’s image processing program ImageJ.  A theoretical model of the system was created using Binary Maker 3.0 to study the motion of the system and to compare to the observed data.