The KOI network

Welcome to the only network in the world conformed by middle-sized telescopes getting ready to observe the Kepler field and continue characterizing exoplanets. The network has two main advantages: while the longitudinal coverage allows continuous monitoring of the sky, the large apertures of the involved telescopes are required to observe the 13-15 mag Kepler stars. Observations will begin this March, 2014.

Most of the already existent follow-up networks are conformed by small-sized telescopes. Since Kepler objects are generally faint, large amounts of exposure time are required to achieve precise photometric data. Furthermore, most of the KOIs reported to have large-amplitude TTVs produce shallow primary transits. Therefore, small telescopes can potentially produce primary transit light curves that are poorly sampled, being the detectability secured only for deep transits. All together, small telescopes can not follow-up most of the KOIs. In comparison to other networks, ours presents two fundamental advantages:

- Large collecting areas: This will allow to follow-up KOIs that are faint (~13-16 KP) and present shallow primary transit events, minimizing observational biases. It is important to keep in mind that the TTVs have been already detected, and that the TTV amplitude is of the order of minutes. Therefore, detecting such offsets will not be challenging.

- Large longitudinal coverage: most of the KOIs are conformed by planets in large orbits. Since the transit duration grows linearly with the orbital period, for some of the KOIs the transit duration is longer than the astronomical night in a given site. Therefore, more than one site is required to fully observe the eclipse event. The configuration indicated with red circles in Fig. 2 will allow 24 hours of continuous observations. The participation of Hawaiian and Indian telescopes is crucial.