Letter to the Editor

The first WASP public data release

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK e-mail: oliver.butters@star.le.ac.uk
² Astrophysics Group, School of Physical and Geographical Sciences, Lennard-Jones Laboratories, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK
³ School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, North Haugh, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9SS, UK
⁴ STScI, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
⁶ Astrophysics Research Centre, Main Physics Building, School of Mathematics & Physics, Queen's University, University Road, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK
⁷ NASA Exoplanet Science Institue, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
⁸ Las Cumbres Observatory, 6740 Cortona Drive Suite 102, Goleta, CA 93117, USA
⁹ Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK

Received: 27 August 2010
Accepted: 24 September 2010

Abstract

The WASP (wide angle search for planets) project is an exoplanet transit survey that has been automatically taking wide field images since 2004. Two instruments, one in La Palma and the other in South Africa, continually monitor the night sky, building up light curves of millions of unique objects. These light curves are used to search for the characteristics of exoplanetary transits. This first public data release (DR1) of the WASP archive makes available all the light curve data and images from 2004 up to 2008 in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. A web interface () to the data allows easy access over the Internet. The data set contains 3 631 972 raw images and 17 970 937 light curves. In total the light curves have 119 930 299 362 data points available between them.