A simulated planetary transit, with the associated light curve
An amateur astronomer colleague of mine, Mátyás SZŰCS, got me inspired to look into exoplanets — once again. I already had a close encounter with distant solar systems, while looking into the Kepler measurements as published on the planethunters org website, going through some 4k stars of interest, of the some 160k that Kepler observed during its first mission.
I’ve never done observations of this kind before, maybe I never will. But I wanted to see what it is I could expect. I put together a naive simulation and then looked up some professional material to check for those into such stuff.
So I went for a rather naive approach here, went for numeric simulations in… well, PHP… with a color (rgb) selective limb darkening and planets with no atmosphere. The stars are simple, spherical, no polar brightening and no flattening, as with say Vega.
The interesting thing is the sharp drop between the first and second contacts and then the steady drop till the maximum — see below.
