SPECULOOS Northern Observatory: searching for red worlds in the northern skies

TL;DR

The SPECULOOS Northern Observatory, with its Artemis telescope, has demonstrated high photometric precision over three years, enabling the search for transiting terrestrial planets around ultracool dwarfs in the northern sky.

Contribution

This paper reports the development and performance of the northern counterpart to the SPECULOOS project, including the first three years of observational data and technical capabilities.

Findings

Observed 96 targets over 6000 hours with 0.5% photometric precision

Achieved 0.2% precision for bright non-variable targets

Weather downtime was 30%, with an additional 10% due to technical issues

Abstract

SPECULOOS is a ground-based transit survey consisting of six identical 1-m robotic telescopes. The immediate goal of the project is to detect temperate terrestrial planets transiting nearby ultracool dwarfs (late M-dwarf stars and brown dwarfs), which could be amenable for atmospheric research with the next generation of telescopes. Here, we report the developments of the northern counterpart of the project - SPECULOOS Northern Observatory, and present its performance during the first three years of operations from mid-2019 to mid-2022. Currently, the observatory consists of one telescope, which is named Artemis. The Artemis telescope demonstrates remarkable photometric precision, allowing it to be ready to detect new transiting terrestrial exoplanets around ultracool dwarfs. Over the period of the first three years after the installation, we observed 96 objects from the SPECULOOS target list for 6000 hours with a typical photometric precision of $0.5\%$, and reaching a precision of $0.2\%$ for relatively bright non-variable targets with a typical exposure time of 25 sec. Our weather downtime (clouds, high wind speed, high humidity, precipitation and/or high concentration of dust particles in the air) over the period of three years was 30% of overall night time. Our actual downtime is 40% because of additional time loss associated with technical problems.