The Hungarian Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) project is a network of six small fully automated "HAT" telescopes. The scientific goal of the project is to detect and characterize extrasolar planets using the transit method. This network is used also to find and follow bright variable stars. The network is maintained by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
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The HAT acronym stands for Hungarian-made Automated Telescope, because it was developed by a small group of Hungarians who met through the Hungarian Astronomical Association. The project started in 1999 and has been fully operational since May 2001.
Equipment
The prototype instrument, HAT-1 was built from a 180 mm focal length and 65 mm aperture Nikon telephoto lens and a Kodak KAF-0401E chip of 512 × 768, 9 μm pixels. The test period was from 2000 to 2001 at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest.
HAT-1 was transported from Budapest to the Steward Observatory, Kitt Peak, Arizona, USA, in January 2001. The transportation caused serious damage to the equipment.
Later built telescopes use Canon 11 cm diameter f/1.8L lenses for a wide-field of 8°×8°. It is a fully automated instrument with 2K x 2K Charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors. One HAT instrument operates at the Wise Observatory.
HAT is controlled by a single Linux PC without human supervision. Data are stored in a MySQL database.
HAT-South
From 2009, three other locations joined the HATNet with telescopes of completely new design. The telescopes are deployed to Australia, Namibia and Chile. Each system has eight (2*4) joint-mounted, quasi-parallel Takahashi Epsilon (180 mm diameter, f/2.8) astrographs with Apogee 4k*4k CCDs with overlapping fields of view. The processing computers are Xenomai-based industrial PCs with 10 TB of storage. The funding is provided until 2013.
Participants in the project
HAT-1 was developed during the undergraduate (and also the first year graduate) studies of Gáspár Bakos (Eötvös Loránd University) and at Konkoly Observatory (Budapest), under the supervision of Dr. Géza Kovács. In the development József Lázár, István Papp and Pál Sári also played an important role.
Planets discovered
Twenty-nine extrasolar planets have been discovered so far by the HATNet project (note that the discovery of the planet WASP-11b/HAT-P-10b, WASP-40b/HAT-P-27b and WASP-51b/HAT-P-30b was simultaneously announced by the SuperWASP team). All have been discovered using the transit method. In addition, the radial velocity followup has detected an additional companion, either a massive planet or a small brown dwarf around the star HAT-P-13, making this the first known transiting planet in a system with an outer companion in a well-characterised orbit.
Light green rows indicate that the planet orbits one of the stars in a binary star system.
North
South