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The PLATO GOP ETE-Test

Motto: Get ready for southern planets in the first PLATO field (LOPS2)
Small telescopes help to test the confirmation and decontamination of transit-signals of planet candidates in preparation for the PLATO mission.
The test is an effort of the PLATO Ground based observation programme (GOP) to assure that all systems and procedures are ready for the PLATO mission (launch end 2026 with and Ariane 6).


Updated: 2025-06-02, 2025-05-30, 2025-05-28, GW; Ephemerides updated: 2025-05-07; Reach: 2025-10-18; GW; If your site is missing: contact Verein@Kuffner-Sternwarte.at

Call for observations

The PLATO ground based observation programme (GOP) calls for citizen participation in the end-to-end test of the planet validation programme.

All targets are in the first PLATO-field (LOPS2) - citizen-planet-test

The GOP calls for data submission of lightcurves via VarAstro for the following sources, specified by their TOI-numbers:
153.01 (FP), 199.01 (CP), 201.01 (CP), 258.0 (FP), 276.01 (FP), 481.01 (CP), 500.01 (CP), 700.01 (CP), 746.01 (FP), 928.01 (FP),

False positives (no planets)
Confirmed planets
to confirm/reproduce theirs status as fast as possible. Some are known to be no planets, so called "false positives" as indicated by the typ column. The goal is here to check that all procedures are fast and ready for the real PLATO candidates and most importantly find problems and correct them. Thank you for considering to contribute to that effort.

Please measure:

  1. the brightness of the main source, the "TOI", during, and one hour before and after the event ("lightcurve"),
  2. and, if possible, alle sources within 1 arcmin from the main source, and with magnitudes up to 10 magv fainter than the main source.
Light curves for the main source and every one of the nearby sources (identified e.g. by GAIA ID) are separate uploads to VarAstro. Put a note "nearby source of TOI ..." into the remarks.

Urgent: transit like-events to observe with photometric time series for the ETE-test

Note: the events are due to planets, planet candidates, and eclipsing binaries, as indicated by their type. The goal is here to show that procedures are accurate and fast fall all types of signals.
Events (transits and others) for some southern locations:
Auckland, Cape Town, El Sauce Observatory, Mt. John Observatory, Perth Observatory, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Sydney.

Please submit data directly to VarAstro / Exoplanets (Registration required)

Your favorite site is not on the list? Contact Verein@kuffner-sternwarte.at and send site details.

What is needed

High precision differential photometry of the target star and the nearby stars over a period covering the event - ingress/egress/center - and at least one hour before and after the event in order to well characterise the before/after levels.

The goal is not a full lightcurve, but a detection of the transit event and possibly a confirmation of its expected properties. That means to collect evidence that the transit is occuring with the expected parameters at high confidence levels. That includes distinction from random (noise) and systematic (contaminants, weather photometric stability) errors.

Recommended equipment / experience:

Starting now, selected current planet candidates will be made available at the Exoplanet Transit Database (ETD) listed as planet candidates. ETD provides coordinates, finder-charts, transit- predictions, and a search for transits for given observing location. Results can be uploaded to ETD, including a simple automatic analysis. Directly to the list of ETD-TOI-transits for the next day

Transiting planets of bright stars, TESS and PLATO

The PLATO space telescopes are designed to find and measure terrestrial planets with orbits typical for the inner solar system. PLATO will go were its precursors CoRoT an Kepler had to stop. It will measure bright stars, as the NASA mission TESS already does, in search for shorter period planets. This provides a unique opportunity to gain experience with small telescopes, an experience that will be needed once PLATO is in orbit.

PLATO has a total light collection power slightly larger than NASA's Kepler. But the innovative optical segmentation concept (distribution of light-collection over 2+24 telescopes) allows ist to be applied to a large number of bright stars and thus, for the first time high accuracy determination of stellar properties including ages and an accurate determination of planetary masses for entire systems and planets in the terretrial regime - an Earth mass in Earth-sized orbit around a solar masss star.

The data obtained will serve the support of TESS and the development of an optimised instrument, the PLATO PlanetValidator, which will be tuned for testing the planet candidates of bright stars. The PlanetValidator will also allow the measurement of the properties of large PLATO-planets with small telescopes.

PLATO's and TESS' return to the bright stars puts small telecopes back into the focus of astronomy. They allow tests of PLATO and TESS transit-signals: are they "true" planets or "fake" signals?

The TOI-candidates (TOI = TESS Object of Interest) have been listed by the NASA-mission TESS and they are part of the TESS TOIS release programme. These candidates are signals the are planet-like according to the quick-look of the TESS-team. Some of the signals detected by TESS are due to known planets discovered by the space missions CoRoT, Kepler, K2, and ground based searches as WASP, HAT, KELT, .... . They will not extra added to the ETD as TESS-candidates, but may appear in the transit prediction ephemerides below, marked with their discovery programme (CoRoT, Kepler, ...).

An explanation of TESS compared to PLATO is available on the PLATO-Consortium-pages.

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