The Next Generation Transit Survey

This talk introduced and described the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), which is a new ground-based transit survey operating at the ESO Paranal Observatory. NGTS has been designed to achieve better photometric precision than previous ground-based surveys; it aims to detect Neptune-sized planets around Sun-like stars, and sub-Neptunes around M dwarfs that are sufficiently bright for radial-velocity confirmation and mass determination. NGTS is also optimised for ground-based follow up of exoplanet candidates from TESS and PLATO. I presented early results from the survey, and described the status of our HARPS radial-velocity and SAAO photometric follow-ups of exoplanet candidates.