Winer ObservatoryTom Kaye's Science at Winer Observatory
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 shown on the left.
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.
Page last updated on: December 6, 2013
