Search

A CCD Camera Lidar system called the CLidar system images a vertically pointing laser from the side with a spatially separated CCD camera and wide angle optics. The system has been used to investigate case studies of aerosols in mountain boundary layers in in the times following sunset. The aerosols detected by the system demonstrate the wide variation of near ground aerosol structure and capabilities of the CLidar system.

CLidar or camera lidar is a simple, inexpensive technique to measure nighttime tropospheric aerosol profiles. Stars in the raw data images used in the CLidar analysis can also be used to calculate aerosol optical depth simultaneously. A single star can be used with the Langley method or multiple star pairs can be used to reduce the error. The estimated error from data taken under clear sky conditions at Mauna Loa Observatory is approximately +/- 0.01.

Between November, 2015 and January, 2015, the Goddard Space Flight Center operated a pair of lidar instruments at the NOAA facility at Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii (Lat. 19.5N, Lon. 155.5 W, Altitude 3.397 km). Measurements were made during six different four week periods during this time period by both the NASA GSFC Stratospheric Ozone Lidar (STROZ) and the Aerosol and Temperature (ATL) lidar. Also making measurements were the JPL Stratospheric Ozone Lidar and the NOAA Aerosol and Water Vapor Lidar. All instruments participate and archive data with the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change. Measurement comparisons were made among various instruments in accordance with the standard intercomparison protocols of the NDACC.

In these proceedings we give a status update of the Calan-Hertfordshire Extrasolar Planet Search, an international collaboration led from Chile that aims to discover more planets around super metal-rich and Sun-like stars, and then follow these up with precision photometry to hunt for new bright transit planets. We highlight some results from this program, including exoplanet and brown dwarf discoveries, and a possible correlation between metallicity and planetary minimum mass at the lowest planetary masses detectable. Finally we discuss the short-term and long-term future pathways this program can take.

With time-series spectroscopic observations taken with the Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSPEC) at Keck II, we investigated the atmosphere of the close orbiting transiting extrasolar giant planet, HD 189733b. In paticular, we intended to measure the dense absorption line forest around 2.3 micron, which is produced by carbon monoxide (CO). CO is expected to be present in the planetary atmosphere, although no detection of this molecule has been claimed yet. We analyzed the NIRSPEC data with cross-correlation and detect CO absorption in the day-side spectrum of HD 189733b at the known planetary radial velocity semi-amplitude with 99.54% (2.8σ) confidence.

We investigate retrieval of the stellar rotation signal for Proxima Centauri. We make use of high-resolution spectra taken with UVES and HARPS of Proxima Centauri over a 13-yr period as well as photometric observations of Proxima Centauri from ASAS and HST. We measure the Hα equivalent width and Hα index, skewness and kurtosis and introduce a method that investigates the symmetry of the line, the peak ratio, which appears to return better results than the other measurements. Our investigations return a most significant period of 82.6 ± 0.1 days, confirming earlier photometric results and ruling out a more recent result of 116.6 days which we conclude to be an alias induced by the specific HARPS observation times. We conclude that whilst spectroscopic Hα measurements can be used for period recovery, in the case of Proxima Centauri the available photometric measurements are more reliable. We make 2D models of Proxima Centauri to generate simulated Hα, finding that reasonable distributions of plage and chromospheric features are able to reproduce the equivalent width variations in observed data and recover the rotation period, including after the addition of simulated noise and flares. However the 2D models used fail to generate the observed variety of line shapes measured by the peak ratio. We conclude that only 3D models which incorporate vertical motions in the chromosphere can achieve this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]