The KELT-South Telescope

TL;DR

The KELT-South telescope is a small, automated instrument designed to survey the southern sky for transiting Hot Jupiters around bright stars, demonstrating sufficient photometric precision for such detections.

Contribution

This paper details the hardware, software, and observational capabilities of KELT-South, establishing its effectiveness in detecting transiting exoplanets.

Findings

Achieves photometric precision suitable for Hot Jupiter transit detection

Surveys 26x26 degree fields targeting stars of 8-10 mag

Successfully demonstrates observational quality for exoplanet searches

Abstract

The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) project is a survey for new transiting planets around bright stars. KELT-South is a small-aperture, wide-field automated telescope located at Sutherland, South Africa. The telescope surveys a set of 26 degree by 26 degree fields around the southern sky, and targets stars in the range of 8 < V < 10 mag, searching for transits by Hot Jupiters. This paper describes the KELT-South system hardware and software and discusses the quality of the observations. We show that KELT-South is able to achieve the necessary photometric precision to detect transits of Hot Jupiters around solar-type main-sequence stars.