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00:00 site local. Astronomical dark, moon down. Sun -79°. Moon 1% waning crescent. Median SQM 21.9. No long moonless night in the published window

Book a Night

2027-01-17

A three-millimagnitude dip, eventually

Transit photometry run on Sombra: five hours of continuous 30-second exposures either side of a predicted ingress, defocused deliberately so the star spreads across enough pixels to average out the flat-field error.

Raw light curve looked like noise. It always does. After differential correction against four comparison stars in the field the dip is unambiguous — about three millimagnitudes, ninety minutes wide, exactly where the ephemeris said.

The lesson I try to get across on residencies is that this is what detection looks like: not a picture, a plot, and one you have to work to trust.

Logged by Wren Okonkwo, visiting fellow.