Tom Kaye, an amateur astronomer from the Chicago, Illinois area, installed his Tau Boo campaign equipment at our facility in mid-February, 2000. In the above photo, the University of Iowa 0.5-m Iowa Robotic Observatory Telescope is at Position No. 1 (top left), while Tom's Mead LX200 is at Position No. 4 (middle right) of our Sonoita Facility.
Tom used a Meade LX200 16-inch telescope with a custom fiber
feed that permitted him to monitor and correct the star position
to keep it on the fiber using an SBIG AO-7 "adaptive optics" unit.
The custom unit fed the starlight to an optical fiber that
transmits the light to a bench spectrograph located in the
Winer machine shop.
The spectrograph used a grating purchased from a grating
ruling company and two mirrors purchased from Edmund Scientific
for the collimator and the "camera" (visit
http://www.spectrashift.com
for more details of the design of the spectragraph) while the
rest of the spectragraph was homemade. Tom used granite from a
kitchen countertop supplier to build the optical bench and
all the optics mounts, taking care to fabricate everything
from the same slab of granite for thermal stability. He used a
water chiller from a drinking fountain to cool the entire assembly,
and the heating element from a drugstore heating pad connected to
a very expensive temperature sensor/controller to maintain the
temperature of the optical bench within ±1°F
throughout an entire evening and within ±3°F during
the entire three-week observing run. The optical bench, optical
elements, and heating and cooling elements are all contained
inside a wooden box, which is itself surrounded by two layers of
rigid construction foam insulation.
The daily results from mid-February, 2000 to early March, 2000 are:
These are corrected for the Earth's rotation about its axis and its orbital motion about the Sun. When these daily results are combined into a single-phase plot, the result is a better than 3-sigma detection of the extra-solar planet in orbit about Tau Boo that agrees remarkably well with the results obtained by Marcy and Butler using the Keck 10-m telescope:
After another run in April and May 2004 to obtain confirming results,
Tom and his colleagues published a paper with their results:
Kay, T.G., Vanaverbeke, S., and Innis, J., High-precision
radial-velocity measurement with a small telescope: Detection of
the tau Boötis exoplanet, J. Br. Astron. Assoc. 116, 2, pp. 78-83.
Last modified: January 1, 2010.