Plan & Capture Exoplanets

Tonight’s transits arrive as a sortable table, every column live:

• The event – ingress, mid-transit, and egress times, duration, orbital period, and altitude at mid-transit.
• The planet – classified by radius from Terrestrial through Super-Earth, Sub-Neptune and Neptune-like to Gas Giant, with distance in light years.
• The star – spectral class estimated from effective temperature, magnitude, and moon separation for the night.
• O−C – how far recent observations have drifted from the predicted timing, in minutes. This is the number that says a planet needs watching.
• Recommended filter – photometric R Cousins as standard, Luminance when the star is too faint for filtered work, Ic as the alternative on cool red hosts.

Every row links straight out to NASA’s catalog page (or ExoFOP for TESS candidates), the ExoClock database, and SIMBAD – and opens the target in the Exposure Calculator, in SkyView for framing, or as a new project, prefilled.

Select a transit and the timeline draws the night noon-to-noon: twilight gradient in the background, your target’s altitude curve, the moon’s altitude labelled at its peak, and a dashed red line at your minimum altitude.

Over the top sits the event itself. The capture window is shaded – faint across the baseline hour either side, brighter through the transit – with contact markers at ingress, mid, and egress, and the predicted light curve drawn as a scaled dip whose flat bottom is computed from the real transit geometry, not a generic shape.

Meridian-flip markers warn you where a German equatorial would interrupt the run, and a NOW line tells you where you are. It’s the same chart in the planner and inside the project, drawn from the same stored ephemeris.

Press Project on any transit and Astro PM builds it – coordinates, catalog data, equipment, and the full ephemeris stored on the project itself, so every view can compute upcoming transits without going back to the network.

The project gains its own Exoplanet Transit tab with the same night timeline, plus a Set Transit Date control that locks the project to one specific night. Lock it, and the chart, the Transit tab, the project card, and the scheduler all follow that single event.

The recommended capture window is ingress minus one hour to egress plus one hour – the baseline standard ExoClock and the Exoplanet Transit Database both expect.

Reduce the night in HOPS or EXOTIC, then drop the output into the project’s Results tab. Astro PM parses it and files it permanently – and finds your fitted light-curve plot sitting next to the results file automatically.

What it reads back out is the science, not just the file: fitted radius ratio with uncertainties, transit depth, mid-transit time with its error in minutes, epoch, and O−C against the catalog ephemeris.

Alongside those sit the quality metrics ExoClock actually grades submissions on – residual scatter in parts per thousand, reduced chi-squared, autocorrelation and Shapiro tests, outliers removed – each marked with a tick or a warning so you know whether the run is worth submitting before you submit it.

Every observation you file becomes a column. The planner builds a comparison table for each planet you’ve measured: the published catalog values down one side, then one dated column per observation, newest first.

Watch your own depth and mid-time measurements line up against the literature. Watch your O−C values scatter – or drift. Observe the same planet across seasons and the pattern is right there in front of you, because the app kept every run.

Switch on My observations and the planner always surfaces the planets you’ve already worked on, each showing its next matching transit – even when that falls months from now.