The WASP Project and the SuperWASP Cameras

The SuperWASP cameras are wide-field imaging systems at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, and at the Sutherland Station of the South African Astronomical Observatory. Each instrument has a field of view of some 482 deg2 with an angular scale of 13.7" pixel-1, and is capable of delivering photometry with accuracy better than 1% for objects having V~7.0-11.5. Lower quality data for objects brighter than V~15.0 are stored in the project archive. The systems, while designed to monitor fields with high cadence, are capable of surveying the entire visible sky every 40 minutes. Depending on the observational strategy, the data rate can be up to 100 Gbytes per night. We have produced a robust, largely automatic reduction pipeline and advanced archive, which are used to serve the data products to the consortium members. The main science aim of these systems is to search for bright transiting exoplanet systems suitable for spectroscopic follow-up observations. The first 6 month season of SuperWASP-North observations produced light curves of ~6.7 million objects with 12.9 billion data points.

The SuperWASP wide-field exoplanetary transit survey: candidates from fields 23 h <RA <03 h

Photometric transit surveys promise to complement the currently known sample of extra-solar planets (ESPs) by providing additional information on the planets and especially their radii. Here, we present ESP candidates from one such survey called, the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) obtained with the SuperWASP wide-field imaging system. Observations were taken with SuperWASP North located in La Palma during the 2004 April to October observing season. The data cover fields between 23 and 03 h in RA at declinations above +12. This amounts to over ~400000 stars with V magnitudes 8-13.5. For the stars brighter than 12.5, we achieve better than 1 per cent photometric precision. Here, we present 41 sources with low-amplitude variability between ~1 and 10 mmag, from which we select 12 with periods between 1.2 and 4.4 d as the most promising ESP candidates. We discuss the properties of these ESP candidates, the expected fraction of transits recovered for our sample and implications for the frequency and detection of hot-Jupiters.