TAOS I

[ Copyright: TAOS I ]

TAOS I (the Taiwan American Occultation Survey) aims to detect small (~1 km) objects beyond the orbit of Neptune (i.e. TNOs and KBOs). TAOS I uses four small (50 cm) telescopes operating in “Zipper Mode” to achieve 5Hz readout.

I joined TAOS I when I was a master student for developing a photometric pipeline, which was also a subject of my master thesis. After preprocessing of the TAOS I data such as catalog preparation, data flagging, deriving WCS solution, distortion correction, background removal, and etc., I found three event candidates from three telescopes (another one telescope was not operating).

[ Three occultation event candidates (Kim 2006) ]