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BEST II In Search of Exoplanets
In the Atacama Desert in Chile stands BEST II, a telescope developed by the “German Aerospace Center” (DLR), which operates independently (“robotically”). The basis for this is a GM 4000 mount from 10Micron. The task of BEST II is the photographic observation of the star fields that are being searched for exoplanets with the COROT satellite.
Dr. Ruth Titz from the DLR Institute of Planetary Research writes to us about the GM 4000:
We bought the instrument because of its accuracy, good quality, and compact design. Colleagues in the institute had already had good experiences with this mount, which also contributed to our purchasing decision.
An equally equipped GM 4000 stands near Berlin in Liebenhof, in the Märkische Schweiz Nature Park – still a very dark area – and serves as a control and test instrument. It can be controlled remotely from Liebenhof.
In general, we want to observe sections of the sky of about 3 x 3 degrees with the telescope, and continuously for as long as possible. In these fields with thousands of stars, we record the stellar intensities – ideally, we would like to observe one field without interruption. The recordings of the light curves of individual stars are examined for drops in intensity (in the range of percent or per mille). Such drops provide candidates for stars around which a planet may be orbiting, dimming the starlight through its transit. Since such fluctuations can also have other causes (binary stars, starspots, and others), it is a search for a needle in a haystack.”
Article about BEST II on the DLR website: In Search of Extrasolar Planets
