The year 2025 marked a turning point for RFO’s research program. The Research Committee transformed the RC20 telescope from a capable but manually operated instrument into a fully automated research platform, expanded into two new scientific disciplines, and established formal structures that have made the program more productive, more accessible, and more capable of producing …
Tag: exoplanets
Annual Research Report 2024: First Exoplanet Transits, New Cameras, and a Variable Star in Decline
2024 was a year of firsts and dramatic moments for the RFO Research Committee. Theteam quadrupled its image output over 2023, capturing more than 3,000 science imagesacross 78 observing nights. New cameras went into service on the RC20, exoplanettransits were successfully observed for the first time, and in September a closely watchedvariable star began one …
Watching a World Cross Its Star: RFO’s First Exoplanet Transit Campaigns
One of the most powerful methods for detecting planets around other stars is also one of the most elegantly simple: when a planet passes directly in front of its host star from our perspective, the star dims very slightly — typically by less than one percent — for a predictable period of time. The dimming …