STRESS - STEREO TRansiting Exoplanet and Stellar Survey - I : Introduction and Data Pipeline (1108.2199v1)

Abstract: The Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory - \emph{STEREO}, is a system of two identical spacecraft in Heliocentric Earth orbit. We use the two Heliospheric Imagers (HI), which are wide angle imagers with multi-baffle systems to do high precision stellar photometry in order to search for exoplanetary transits and understand stellar variables. The large cadence (40 min for HI-1 and 2 hrs for HI-2), high precision, wide magnitude range (\emph{R} mag - 4 to 12) and broad sky coverage (nearly 20 percent just for HI-1A and 60 per cent of the sky in the zodiacal region for all the instruments combined) of this instrument marks this in a space left largely devoid by other current projects. In this paper, we describe the semi-automated pipeline devised for the reduction of this data, some of the interesting characteristics of the data obtained, data analysis methods used along with some early results.