After a few nights doing some general astrophotography and learning how to operate my rig, I finally made my first attempt at capturing an exoplanet transit. After sifting through the Swarthmore transit finder, I decided on TOI-1811 b since it has a fairly deep transit and is relatively bright. Despite poor tracking, even worse seeing, and moderate winds, I managed to get good enough data to generate a light curve using AstroImageJ!
It took a while and several tutorials (mainly the Practical Guide to Exoplanet Observing by Dr. Dennis Conti and a video by Patriot Astro) to figure out AstroImageJ, but once I finally got it working it was something else seeing the light curve slowly build up. And despite this mainly being an experiment to see if I even could do it at all, I felt confident enough to submit my observation to the AAVSO. I can't wait to try more targets later on. I already know I need to be increasing my baseline pre- and post-transit, and I just got a guide camera so hopefully using that in an OAG should help improve my subs. But despite all the issues I've run into this is proving to be quite a rewarding hobby!
