Sleuth: The Palomar Planet Finder

The Sleuth telescope ended its survey in 2008.

The Palomar Observatory's smallest telescope was known as Sleuth. Sleuth was a robotic telescope dedicated toward the search for planets around other stars. Specifically it searched for signs of gas-giant planets passing directly in front of  (transiting) a star.

To do this Sleuth nightly monitored roughly 10,000 stars 6 degree square field-of-view in the hunt for these transiting extrasolar gas-giant planets. This planet finder was the third instrument in a network that also contains STARE (located in Tenerife) and PSST (located in northern Arizona). Candidates identified by Sleuth were then observed by our automated follow-up telescope to rule out most forms of false positives resulting from eclipsing binaries.

  • Press release: Astronomers Find Largest Exoplanet to Date

  • Press release: Astronomers Find Their Third Planet With Novel Telescope Network

  • Press release: Jupiter-Sized Transiting Planet Found by Astronomers Using Novel Telescope Network.


    Computer generated simulation of TrES-2. Credit: Jeffrey Hall, Lowell Observatory More on TrES-2

    Press image showing relative sizze of Sleuth & Keck Telescopes:

  • Photo of Sleuth from the December, 2004 issue of National Geographic Magazine

    Scientific publications from Sleuth.

    Choose one of the telescopes listed on the right to see images and learn more about another of  the Palomar Observatory's Telescopes.