The KELT-South Telescope

The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) project is a survey for new transiting planets around bright stars. KELT-South is a small-aperture, wide-field automated telescope located at Sutherland, South Africa. The telescope surveys a set of 26° × 26° fields around the southern sky and targets stars in the range of 8 < V < 10 mag, searching for transits by hot Jupiters. This article describes the KELT-South system hardware and software and discusses the quality of the observations. We show that KELT-South is able to achieve the necessary photometric precision to detect transits of hot Jupiters around solar-type main-sequence stars.

The KELT-South telescope is funded and operated by Vanderbilt University and Fisk University in cooperation with the South African Astronomical Observatory.