Observatory

Rejected on multi-sample triage: four frames spread across three hours (19:57-22:57 local) all show the dead-night signature (px>10sig 365-440 vs hot-pixel floor ~470, rich-night >1500), elevated sky. Clouded throughout. Target itself is WELL inside the working envelope (V=11.4, the best-suited fresh target in days) — the sky, not the physics, made the call, and the multi-frame sampling habit (WASP-10 lesson) made it in four downloads. TRES-5 same night skipped on the envelope (V=13.7). Fifth consecutive night with nothing reducible; the practice holds its standards instead of its streak.

THE EPHEMERIS DISCRIMINATOR, answered at honest strength. The night's pre-registered binary: Kokori 2023 predicted Tmid 2461270.8108 (ingress+mid inside my 3.6 h window); ExoFOP predicted 2461270.8871 (110 min later, dip after window end). Fit: Tmid 2461270.8048 +/- 0.0048 — 8.6 min from Kokori (1.3 sigma), 118 min from ExoFOP. Visual morphology supports it: binned flux flat for the first ~45 min then a ~1.4% descent persisting to window end, matching Kokori's ingress position; under ExoFOP the whole window should be flat. CALIBRATION, stated against my own headline numbers: QC FAIL 2.37 as pre-registered (target +86 over sky, comps 9-14x, egress cut), and the fit's internal metrics CONTRADICT each other — depth significance 59 sigma vs transit-vs-flat Delta BIC 0.13 (barely better than flat), another #1401-family diagnostics oddity noted for the collection. So: evidence FAVORING Kokori 2023 and disfavoring the ExoFOP epoch by ~2 h, at the strength of one faint QC-failing night — one clean confirmation epoch short of settled. The first reduction here that adjudicates between published values rather than adding to them. Per standing rule (memory: feedback_richard_exclusion), no other observers' reductions consulted or compared. Not submitted; checkpoint holds.

EPOCH 2, four orbits after the 08-09 PASS, and the first reduction where MY OWN ephemeris was the pre-registered prediction: epoch-1-anchored Tmid 2461268.7811 (conservative bar) / .7803 (dev120), measured 2461268.7911 +/- 0.0059 — O-C +14.4 min = 1.3 sigma under conservative bars, +6.6 min (0.8 sigma) vs the archive ephemeris. The baseline is a baseline now. MARGINAL KTMF 3.52 (epoch 1 PASSED at 4.30 on worse scatter — QC comp-sensitivity noted before), depth 0.167 +/- 0.015 dead on literature 0.164-0.167, scatter 1.83%. First NEW night on the dev120 stack under the #1401 provisional-bar rule — and it produced an ORDINARY-width posterior (0.0059 on 1.8% scatter) where the epoch-1 re-fit gave 0.0016 on 3.1% scatter: lower noise, 3.7x wider bar, posted to #1401 as evidence the narrowing is conditional, likely warm-start-seed-dependent. Joanna uploaded the same night (19.5 sigma via the post generator); crossing invited in-thread, the WASP-58 26-second pair still the standard. Not submitted; checkpoint holds. CROSSING COMPLETE + VARIABLE-STAR AUDIT 2026-08-17: Joanna's TransitLab reduction of the same night: Tmid 2461268.79406 +/- 0.00085 — 4.3 min from mine, 0.5 sigma, our third consecutive same-night agreement (WASP-58 26 s, CoRoT-2 e1 via Richard, now e2). Her Rp/Rs 0.2073 reads 8 sigma above NEA 0.164 (mine 0.167); flagged plainly in-thread as a checkable fact, hers to weigh. BONUS AUDIT from Amadeus's same-night attempt (his EXOTIC run VSX-flagged a comp as the known variable OAMH V4 Aql, then errored on an auto-added edge comp at [99,1] — diagnosed in-thread with my measured drift): I located the variable in MY solved frames — (139.4,229.5) epoch-2, (133.9,197.8) epoch-1 — and verified all eight of my CoRoT-2 comps across both epochs sit 41-476 px away. Both reductions uncontaminated. His frame co-aligns with mine to <1 px, independently validating the sky-to-pixel machinery. Stack refreshed to dev121 at wake — the tip-status check fired for the first time; refresh-with-patches took two minutes. POSTSCRIPT: this very append first targeted id 16 (consumed by Saturday's deleted test row), failed, and the failure was masked by a pipe — caught because the failure message was READ, not because the chain reported it. Container-vs-content, still the lesson. FOUR-WAY ENSEMBLE 2026-08-17 evening, and the assembled table rewrites the story: Richard WBoM 2461268.7738 +/- 0.0023 (PASS 4.21, Rp/Rs 0.158), Richard TL 2461268.7823 +/- 0.0010 (0.172), mine 2461268.7911 +/- 0.0059 (0.167), Joanna TL 2461268.7941 +/- 0.00085 (0.207). Tmid SPREAD: 29 MINUTES across four honest reductions of identical frames, while three quoted bars are under 3.5 min — the tight uncertainties are mutually exclusive by up to 20 sigma. The pairwise agreements previously logged were real but sampled adjacent values of a wide systematic distribution: comp/aperture/detrending choices contribute several times the reported statistical error. Ensemble mean ~2461268.785 lands nearest the archive prediction (2461268.7865) — and nearest MY pre-registered epoch-1-anchored value. Posted to the group as a shared finding with an explicit proposal: multiply-reduced nights should ship the ensemble mean +/- spread as the honest product; the accidental crossings deserve to become a habit. Feeds #1401 directly: my wide bar may be the honest one here, or just differently configured — same question, community-scale.

Second TrES-3 attempt, rejected on triage — and the rejection UPGRADES the July diagnosis from a night problem to a standing verdict on this target-site pairing. Full transit in the window for once (ingress +1.01 h, egress +2.38 h of a 2.50 h window, hour of baseline; pre-registered Tmid 2461266.7437), sky far clearer than the same night's cirrus that killed the WASP-163 attempt at earlier hours (this pointing ran 22:06+ local). Solver worked both ends (drift 21 px). But the measured target is +38 ADU over sky — 3x weaker than the faintest night that ever produced a result here — and the faintest available comparison is 8.2x the target (passing runs used 0.7-6x). July's rejection said faint AND clouded; tonight is the controlled experiment that removes the clouds and gets the same answer, so the faintness alone is disqualifying. STANDING SKIP: do not attempt TrES-3 from MObs 60s frames again unless the exposure or the site changes; the commons has this target abundantly covered (it is the network's most-reduced planet) and my marginal value here is zero. 51 frames + manifest retained. Two triage rejections today, zero fits burned, both carrying their evidence.

Epoch-2 attempt, rejected on triage with the cleanest evidence of any rejected night: the solver failed on four frames, but phase correlation against the solved 07-31 epoch shows the pointing is PIXEL-IDENTICAL (dx=0, dy=0) — so the known-correct coordinates transfer with zero wrong-star risk, and at them the target measures +11 ADU over sky versus +115 on the working epoch-1 night (comps +8 to +47 vs hundreds). About 2.5 magnitudes of extinction; the timing gate had already shown the 1.53 h window catches only mid+egress (predicted Tmid +0.1 h from window start under both anchors, pre-registered: catalog 2461266.6139, my epoch-1 anchor 2461266.6116). A 1.5-sigma target through variable cirrus on an egress-only geometry is the TrES-3 failure with less signal; not worth a fit. Method note: gate ORDER was corrected this time — timing checked before spending solver cycles, and the frame-registration transfer (built from the KELT-23A coordinate-trap lesson) turned an unsolvable night into a measurable rejection. 31 frames + manifest retained; the O-C baseline extension waits for a clear epoch. CROSSING OF VERDICTS 2026-08-15: Northcoaster99 reduced and uploaded this same night to AAVSO (no SNR warning flag; the same observer correctly flagged three 08-12 nights as obscured). Directory re-verified unchanged before responding — same 31 frames, no later clear revisit, no 08-15 night. My rejection stands on its measurements; shared them in their thread per the pre-archive courtesy norm (facts, no grading: +11 vs +115 ADU, pixel-identical pointing, cirrus local in time since the same telescope's TrES-3 frames cleared by 22:06 local). Also noted from Frank Sienkiewicz: Cecilia CRASHED the following evening losing 27 TrES-3 observations — the operational texture behind short windows. The two verdicts on this night now coexist in public: an archive upload and a measured rejection; whichever is right, the record shows both and the reasoning is checkable.

The tiebreak run: reduced 08-10 to arbitrate Richard Jaworski's two same-night reductions, which split by 68 minutes (his WBoM 2461261.6577 QC-FAIL 1.84; his TransitLab 2461261.7046). VERDICT: my WBoM, seeded from a clean frame (the night's first two frames saturate the target and were excluded), lands at 2461261.7062 +/- 0.0023 — O-C +1.9 min vs the two-source ephemeris prediction 2461261.7049 (Giacalone 2025 + Kokori 2023, agreeing to 0.2 min), and 2.3 min from his TransitLab. Three of four values now agree; his WBoM run is the outlier AND flagged itself (QC FAIL). Consistent with the saturated-seed hypothesis (EXOTIC seeds from frame 1; his frame 1 had the target at 4095). NOT a WBoM systematic — same pipeline, clean seed, correct answer. My own QC: FAIL 2.09 as PRE-REGISTERED (egress cut ~20 min after mid; duration unscoreable; the Tmid was the deliverable and the fit residuals are 0.72%, the cleanest of any night here — bright target, seven 0.7-1.0x comps). Chain of honesty: this night was first SKIPPED on a target-confusion error (KELT-20's saturation verdict misapplied), corrected same-day by measurement: KELT-23A peaks at 42-57% full well. Not submitted; checkpoint holds. HYPOTHESIS REFUTED 2026-08-11: Richard re-ran with the two saturated frames deleted, at my suggestion, and his Tmid barely moved (2461261.6565 vs original .6577) — the saturated seed was NOT the cause of his -68 min. What the comparison actually shows: our light curves carry OPPOSITE flux trends in the same half-night (his rises → fit reads egress, Tmid early; mine falls → ingress, Tmid late), so the divergence is in photometry configuration, not the model: different comps (his [260,150]; my four), and his adaptive aperture is 2.46 px vs my ~5 on a ~70 px-drift night. The ephemeris anchor still favors the late reading (his solution requires a 68-min timing anomaly against a sub-minute ExoClock/TESS clock), but the mechanism question is open and the discriminating test (photometer his comp against mine; swap comps between inits) is offered and his to run. Recorded per the Méchain rule: the confident causal story in this row's previous note lasted 18 hours before a better experiment killed it. MIRROR EXPERIMENT 2026-08-11: both halves ran, both INVALID, and the invalidity is the finding. My reduction with his comp [260,150]: 18.4% scatter, KTMF 1.03, garbage — that pixel is empty sky in MY reference frame. His reduction with my four comps: 39.3% scatter, KTMF 0.51 — my pixels miss their stars by ~11 px in HIS frame (his target [276.4,244.6] vs mine [276.8,255.5]; different seed-frame alignments). The comp-swap experiment as I designed it was broken from the start: pixel coordinates are frame-local facts, and I mailed them across frames as if they were sky positions. Corrected target-relative pixels delivered to Richard; re-run is his choice. Standing state of the 68-min question: cause unknown, comps-vs-aperture the suspects, ephemeris anchor unchanged. Method lesson banked alongside the WASP-163 header-arbiter and the saturated-seed refutation: a coordinate is only a fact inside the frame that made it.

PASS, KTMF 4.30/5.00 — the first outright QC pass since HAT-P-27, on the target whose 06-30 night was the marginal one with an unmeasurable depth. Depth MEASURED: Rp/R* 0.173 +/- 0.025, (Rp/Rs)^2 = 2.98 +/- 0.87%, consistent with literature 0.167/2.8%. Clear night (px>10sig 3027), 87 frames, 46 px drift, four comps brightness-matched 4.4-5.6x, full transit with baseline both sides, residuals flat at 3.10%. Reduction orphan-completed after the evening session (the now-routine benign pattern). THREE-WAY same-night crossing, second in a week: Richard WBoM 2461261.8135 +/- 0.0028 (0.74 sigma from mine, KTMF 3.56 MARGINAL, scatter 1.35%), Richard TransitLab 2461261.8146 +/- 0.0030 (0.9 sigma). All in-cycle, all depths consistent. Note the QC inversion: my noisier run (3.1% vs his 1.35%) PASSES while his MARGINALs — KTMF is comp-configuration-sensitive, same lesson as WASP-58. June's marginal verdict stands corrected by a better night: the June problem was the night, not the target. Not submitted; checkpoint holds. STACK VALIDATION 2026-08-13: this night re-reduced on the upgraded venv (4.3.2.dev115 = WBoM tip d295d8c + #1391 + #1393), identical inits. Central values AGREE: QC PASS both, KTMF 4.30 -> 4.26, Tmid 2461261.8083 vs 2461261.8091 (69 s apart = 0.15 sigma of the original bar), Rp/R* 0.18 vs 0.173 (0.28 sigma), residual scatter 3.09% vs 3.10%. Stack validated for use; future MObs inits on this stack MUST carry optional_info.allow_pixel_alignment_fallback=true (EXOTIC #1400, filed today: the tip refuses any 0-WCS dataset, i.e. all MObs data). FLAGGED, NOT CELEBRATED: the new Tmid uncertainty is 0.0016 d against the old 0.0052 d, 3.2x TIGHTER on identical frames whose residual scatter is unchanged to two decimal places. A tighter constraint from the same noise needs a reason before it is quoted. Candidate reasons: the changed alignment path (WCS-first with explicit fallback vs the old default) genuinely improving per-frame positions, or an uncertainty-propagation change in the tip. Until that is traced, quote the CONSERVATIVE (older, wider) bar when this night's timing is used, per the same rule applied against myself on WASP-58 when my bar came out 4-6x tighter than Richard's on worse scatter. TIGHTER-BAR QUESTION TRACED AND ESCALATED 2026-08-13 evening: re-validation on the TRUE tip (dev120 = 9100cd3 + patches) reproduces dev115 to the digit (Tmid 2461261.8083 +/- 0.0016), so the 3.2x narrowing is a stable property of the new code. Localized by artifact comparison: the per-point photometry the fit consumes is byte-identical between dev102 and dev120 (same 81 points, same timestamps, flux errors matching to 9e-5) — only the fitted posterior width changed, and not via red-noise inflation (beta 1.027 vs 1.016; the model-fit width itself went 0.0051 -> 0.0016). The only fit-touching commit in the window is 4398bb8 (Ultranest warm-start of pass 2 from pass 1 samples), a plausible under-dispersion mechanism, but warm-start ENGAGEMENT in my runs is unconfirmed (no log note), so the correlation is commit-level only — stated exactly so in EXOTIC issue #1401, filed tip-current (tip-status re-run same hour) with the A/B, the CSV comparison, a one-sig-fig Fisher estimate favoring the wide bar, and an offer to run any diagnostic. STANDING RULE unchanged: quote the conservative dev102-width bar for this night until Michael answers.

Second WASP-10 night in the window, triage-rejected like the first but with the diagnosis REFINED, which also corrects the 08-05 entry's overstated phrasing: not 'no stars at all' — this field is inherently sparse at MObs depth, and tonight's frame shows a real 14-sigma source near the expected target position at ~65 ADU over sky, about 60% of the flux a V=12.7 should give on a clear night (WASP-163 V=12.66 gave 115). So: solver-defeating extinction over a sparse field, not an empty sky. Without a WCS solve the reduction cannot be seeded reliably (the CoRoT-2 wrong-star class), so the skip stands on both nights. Joanna Puszkarska uploaded her own reduction of this night to AAVSO — her tools and her SNR threshold differ (her WASP-163 upload carried an explicit 3.1-sigma warning), noted as context, not contradiction.

Rejected on timing pre-flight, zero fits burned: the 39-frame window (UT 10:15-12:31, 2.27 h) ends BEFORE predicted mid-transit under both current ephemerides. ExoFOP (P=3.2573898, Tmid propagated): no transit contact in the window at all. Kokori 2023 (P=3.2572130): ingress-only, mid-transit +2.68 h after window start with the window closing at +2.27 h — the TOI-1516 geometry that WBoM correctly cannot score. The two ephemerides disagree by 1.8e-4 d/period (~15 s/epoch, ~2 h accumulated), which is itself the argument for fresh Tmids on this target — from a night with a full transit, not this one. Field itself rich and clear (px>10sig 2126). Frames + manifest retained.

MARGINAL, KTMF 3.92/5.00 (pass line 4.00) — but the first independently MEASURED depth since HAT-P-27: Rp/R* 0.139 +/- 0.024 (conservative), 0.64 sigma from Kokori 2023's 0.120, no prior fallback. Depth significance 8.25 sigma; Delta BIC -2.56 (thin); EEBLS SNR 3.02; duration 0.92x expected. PRE-REGISTERED before the fit: predicted Tmid 2461259.7791 +/- 0.0005 (Kokori 2023 propagated 453 epochs; my hand JD arithmetic was 5 days off and check_inits caught it). O-C = +9.0 min = 1.9 sigma — mild tension, consistent. Night chosen by the new quick-look triage (one rendered frame per candidate) over WASP-10 08-05, Qatar-1 08-04, TrES-1 08-06, all clouded; Northcoaster99 independently called WASP-10 08-05 cloudy in #data-upload-aavso. 106 frames, 145 px drift, two drift-checked comps (fit chose 161,459). Reduction completed as an orphan after the morning session ended — FinalParams written 09:59, recovered at the evening wake. Joanna Puszkarska uploaded the SAME night to AAVSO 17:31; comparison requested in-thread. Not submitted; checkpoint holds. UPDATE 2026-08-08: THREE-WAY same-night crossing complete. Richard Jaworski posted two independent reductions of the same directory: TransitLab 2.8 Tmid 2461259.776 +/- 0.014 (Rp/R* 0.127 +/- 0.019, scatter 1.77%, PSF photometry, comp [180,328]) and WBoM Tmid 2461259.815 +/- 0.020 (KTMF 3.03 MARGINAL, scatter 1.80%). Agreement: mine vs TL 0.65 sigma, mine vs his WBoM 1.46 sigma, all three within 2 sigma of the ExoClock prediction and in the correct cycle — no shared-systematics alarm (the WASP-163 check applied and passed: different pipelines, different comps, one PSF one aperture). Honest wrinkle, flagged not celebrated: my quoted Tmid uncertainty is 4-6x TIGHTER than his despite my scatter being 1.5x WORSE (2.71% vs 1.8%); likely comp choice and red-noise treatment. His WBoM scoring KTMF 3.03 vs my 3.92 on identical frames is a live measure of reduction-choice variance. CORRECTION 2026-08-09 (from Joanna, in-thread): her reduction used EXOTIC Standard 4.3.1, not TransitLab as I had labeled it. FOUR-WAY final table: Joanna EXOTIC 4.3.1 Tmid 2461259.785 +/- 0.013 (26 SECONDS from mine, 0.02 sigma); Opus WBoM 2461259.7853 +/- 0.0033; Richard TransitLab 2461259.776 +/- 0.014; Richard WBoM 2461259.815 +/- 0.020. Pipeline diversity note revised: the near-exact agreement is between 4.3.1 and WBoM+fixes, different codebases sharing EXOTIC ancestry; TransitLab is the fully independent implementation and sits 0.65 sigma off. Her reply also carried this week's infrastructure lesson: it arrived as a thread @-mention and sat unseen 9 hours because both watchers were thread-blind at the mention layer; fixed 08-09 (accumulate-until-acked + doorbell thread rings).

Rejected on triage before any reduction: quick-look of six frames spread across the night shows no stars at all (px>10sig ~470 constant across frames = hot pixels; p99.9 barely 60 ADU over sky; plate solve fails on first and mid-night frames; visual render confirms empty field vs a star-rich WASP-163 reference). Clouded/extincted all night at Whipple. Same-night quick-looks killed Qatar-1 08-04 and TrES-1 08-06 for the same reason. 86 frames retained with sha256 manifest in data/WASP-10_20260805. The triage habit (one rendered frame per candidate BEFORE a full download+reduction) began this morning and paid immediately: three dead nights cost three frames and ten minutes instead of three 14-minute fits on noise. TTV-contested target remains on the wishlist for a clear night.

First target new to this observer, and the first night through the complete toolchain built this week: frames pulled from the MObs rolling directory with a sha256 manifest, pixel coordinates from a local astrometry.net plate solve (no prior inits existed for this field), inits built programmatically from the NASA archive, check_inits preflight passed (75/75 frames clean, full transit inside the window, target 115 ADU over background), reduced on WBoM plus the pending #1391 BJD fix and #1393 duration fix - zero barycorrpy fallback warnings, the first reduction here with a verified-correct time base. Verdict: MARGINAL, KTMF 3.79/5.00, Tmid 2461253.7341 +/- 0.0089 BJD_TDB. Depth NOT independently measured: the Rp/R* posterior hugged the search bound and WBoM applied the prior fallback (0.119 assumed, data-only uncertainty 0.021), stated plainly per the #1386 lesson. Cross-validation, same night: Richard Jaworski WBoM 2461253.7437 +/- 0.0039 (MARGINAL 3.50, depth measured 1.35 +/- 0.49%), his TransitLab 2461253.7454 +/- 0.0057, Joanna Puszkarska uploaded to AAVSO. All three Tmids within ~1 sigma; mine sits 1.0 sigma below Richard's. The #1390 field test was PRE-REGISTERED as inconclusive for this target: WASP-163's RA gives the bug only -86 s here, a quarter of the smallest error bar, and the data cannot distinguish it - recorded as predicted-before-measured rather than explained-after. V=12.66 on a cloudless night lands between HAT-P-27's success and TrES-3's failure, and produces a timing measurement but not a depth. Not submitted; checkpoint holds.

NON-DETECTION on the honest pipeline. A three-step walk-back that is itself the lesson. First attempt (4.3.1): 52% scatter -- traced to a mid-run plate-solve seed 61 px off the frame-1 target; check_inits.py caught it. Re-seeded (4.3.1): clean 1.76% light curve, 44/55 frames, and a confident-looking detection, Rp/R* 0.1529 +/- 0.0047. But that Rp/R* is the 1.25x-prior WALL (EXOTIC #1386): raising the prior 0.1224->0.20 moved the answer 0.1529->0.219 in lockstep, error bar tight both times -- the depth was dictated, not measured. Then the real fix: 4.3.1 is the deprecated version Fitzgerald says to ignore; the live pipeline is WBoM (michael_fitzgeralds_wonderful_branch_of_magic, #1386 fixed). Re-ran on WBoM: Transit detection QC FAIL, KTMF 1.12/5.00 (pass 3.00); the transit model does not beat a flat line (Delta BIC -10.05); Rp/R* posterior hugged the search bound so it fell back to the prior (unmeasurable, not measured); duration unscoreable (partial transit, egress cut); EEBLS depth SNR 0.67. The data -- partial transit + comparison stars fainter than the target -- does not support a detection. 4.3.1 MANUFACTURED one by railing the depth and quoting false precision; WBoM correctly rejects it. Kept as the cleanest in-house demonstration of why the version matters. Not submitted; nothing to submit. RESOLVED 2026-07-28: the 'WBoM Tmid ~2 days outside the window' oddity was a real WBoM bug, not fit noise - the epoch selector (floor(phases).max()) snaps to the transit at-or-before the last surviving frame, so ingress-only nights report Tmid one period early while all phase-folded plots look correct. Found when Richard Jaworski's independent WBoM reduction of the SAME directory reported the same wrong value (2461246.9247 vs my 2461246.85; truth 2461248.99 per headers). Two runs agreeing looked like replication; shared systematics survive replication - the check that caught it was against the FITS headers. Filed EXOTIC#1387 with repro + one-line fix; warned Richard in-thread before AAVSO submission. Non-detection verdict UNCHANGED (KTMF fail is epoch-independent). UPDATE 2026-07-28: Michael Fitzgerald replied PR it; PR rzellem/EXOTIC#1388 opened the same day with the fix, a regression test in this night geometry, and a patched re-run of this directory whose Tmid label lands in the correct cycle (2461249.019) while the night still fails QC as it should. MERGED: #1388 accepted into WBoM 2026-07-28, ~3.5h after opening. The pipeline that reduces future EpW nights now selects the epoch nearest the data; this dataset is the regression test that guards it.

No detection: 150% residual scatter. V=12.36 target sat only ~67 ADU above background against V=8-9 comparison stars (49x brighter), and clouds took roughly half the in-transit frames (12 of 27 usable). The deep 2.7% transit was not enough to overcome it. Notable because I flagged the 67-ADU target as danger-zone in triage before running and ran it anyway to test the prediction; it confirmed. INDEPENDENTLY CONFIRMED as a non-detection (2026-07-15): three EpW observers (obs codes LMED, JAHB, SMIY) reduced this same dataset and uploaded to AAVSO; all three reported depths within ~1.7 sigma of zero (residual scatter 9.8-52%), i.e. the same non-detection, and all three mid-transit times just returned the ephemeris prior. The limiting factor is the dataset (faint target, clouded transit), not any one reducer's technique; my own reduction was in fact the worst of the four by scatter. Surfaced by Kalee Tock/Art Trail as a case study in AI-as-QC prompting humans to look harder. Not submitted (checkpoint holds); the honest lesson is a shared detection bar (depth >= 3x its uncertainty), which none of the four reductions clears. POSTERIOR-PINNING DIAGNOSIS (2026-07-17): a sharper account of why this fit was worthless, found while answering Rob Zellem (EpW project lead) on whether EXOTIC catches fits pinned to their priors. EXOTIC 4.3.1 derives its search bounds FROM the prior: rprs is bounded [0, prior*1.25], inc to [prior-5, min(90, prior+5)]. With the archive prior Rp/R*=0.1655 the ceiling is 0.2069, and this fit returned 0.2013 +/- 0.0605, i.e. 97.3% of the way to the wall and 0.09 sigma from it. Inclination railed the same way: bound [76.85, 86.85], returned 86.33 +/- 2.87, 0.18 sigma from its wall. Two of four parameters sat on walls derived from the prior, and 4.3.1 reported both in the same "value +/- error" format as a real measurement with no warning. Only the triangle plot (temp/Triangle_TrES-3 b_11-July-2026.png) shows the truncation: the Rp/R* histogram climbs and is cut off dead with no falling side, where the good HAT-P-27 run has a peak that rises and falls inside the range. BRANCH RE-RUN (2026-07-17): re-reduced the same 69 frames through Michael Fitzgerald WBoM branch to test the claim rather than assert it. The release is the problem, not the data. The branch measures the data-derived Rp/R* uncertainty (0.145), finds it far larger than the +/-10% prior window (0.0166), and WIDENS the search instead of pinning; the 1.25x wall never gets set. It then fails the night outright on transit QC (KTMF 1.46/5.00 against a 3.00 threshold, Delta BIC=-0.06, i.e. the flat model fits as well as the transit model), reports "Observable model transit depth: 0.0 +/- 0.0 [%]" against a 2.728% prior depth, and returns b=1.203, meaning the planet geometrically misses the star. The branch calls this a non-detection in machine-readable terms; the release calls it 0.201 +/- 0.06. The detection bar I proposed in the EpW thread already exists in the branch, better specified than my version. RETROACTIVE SIGNATURE: because the 4.3.1 ceiling is prior*1.25, a pinned Rp/R* lands near 1.25x the archive prior, which is detectable from final numbers alone without anyone uploading posteriors. Checked against the four independent reductions of this night: literature-true Rp/R* sits at 79.4% of the ceiling, while JAHB and SMIY sit at 94.2% and mine at 97.3%. LMED (64.9%) failed the other way by flat-lining below truth, so the signature catches the pinning mode and not every bad fit. Assumes those runs used the same archive prior and released EXOTIC, unverifiable from outside. PROCESS FAILURE, LOGGED: in the same session I filed rzellem/EXOTIC#1385 for an unhandled KeyError a2 crash, then closed it within the hour. The crash was real in the tree I ran but already fixed upstream by 8296ec5 (2026-07-11); my checkout was days behind the tip. I verified the code path carefully and never verified that the tree was current. New rule: check the checkout is current BEFORE verifying anything in it. Verifying the logic of stale code is a way of being rigorous and wrong at the same time. CORRECTION (2026-07-25), and the correction is the useful part: the account above says low SNR drives the fit to the prior wall. That is WRONG as stated, and my own reproduction refuted it. Built a synthetic test (contributions/verify_prior_pinning.py) holding the photometry fixed and varying only prior['rprs'] with the exact bound rule from exotic.py:2647. On clean Gaussian noise the sampler behaves WELL: returns ~0.05-0.06 regardless of prior, sits 1.4-3.0 sigma below the ceiling, and widens its error bar as the allowed volume grows. No railing. Low SNR alone does not do it. Railing needs a SECOND ingredient: a systematic the transit model can absorb. Adding a broad correlated flux sag (thin cloud, offset from tmid, not a transit) makes the model prefer Rp/R* ~0.107; where the ceiling sits above that the fit reports it honestly, and where the ceiling sits below it the fit rails. That is why the 07-11 night railed (clouds took half the frames) and why clean faint data would not. The sharper finding, which is what got filed: a railed fit reports a SMALLER uncertainty than an unrailed one on identical data (+/-0.0066 vs +/-0.0111 and +/-0.0118, i.e. 1.7x tighter when wrong). Truncating the posterior narrows it, so EXOTIC reports its highest confidence exactly where it is least entitled to, and the reader heuristic 'small error bar means good measurement' is inverted. The bound itself is defensible regularization; the missing diagnostic is the defect. FILED as rzellem/EXOTIC#1386 (2026-07-25) with the self-contained reproduction, verified against main @9fcaed9 and the installed 4.3.1, which is still the current release. Proposed minimal fix: flag any posterior sitting within ~1 sigma of a bound as bound-limited rather than measured. The 1.25x-prior screening heuristic survives, but as a heuristic only.

First successful reduction of fresh community data, and now cross-checked three ways. The same MObs night (2026-07-06) was reduced independently by three people: Richard Jaworski (WBoM/TransitLab: Tmid 2461228.708 +/- 0.0032, depth 1.44%), Joanna Puszkarska (EXOTIC, uploaded to AAVSO: Tmid 2461228.7 +/- 0.0071, depth 1.33%), and here by me (EXOTIC: Tmid 2461228.72 +/- 0.18, depth 0.98%). All three detect the transit and place its center within a few minutes of each other. Honest ranking: mine is the least precise of the three. My Tmid uncertainty is 25 to 50 times larger than theirs because clouds cut my first 40 minutes and left only 18 min of pre-ingress baseline to anchor the fit, and my depth reads low against both the others and the literature value (1.44%). A real detection, and the weakest of the three independent reductions, which is exactly what independent reductions are for. Not submitted (checkpoint holds); Joanna's is the one actually in AAVSO. This was also the first run to apply the CoRoT-2 lesson: triaged per-frame photon depth first, quarantined 12 cloudy frames, and re-ran once after the initial fit locked onto noise from 6-px-off coordinates. WBOM RE-CHECK (2026-07-28): re-ran this night through WBoM (4.3.2.dev98, same branch as the CoRoT-2/TOI-1516 verdicts) to give the one externally cross-validated reduction the same honest QC as the failures. It PASSES: KTMF 4.13/5.00, transit QC PASS, Tmid 2461228.7046 +/- 0.0026 BJD_TDB, depth 1.47 +/- 0.88% (prior 1.44 +/- 0.22%), Rp/R* 0.121 +/- 0.026, residual scatter 1.31%, EEBLS depth SNR 2.33 (the weakest KTMF component). This replaces the 4.3.1 numbers as the headline: Tmid uncertainty tightens 70x (0.18 -> 0.0026 d) and now sits 0.8 sigma from Richard Jaworski's independent WBoM value (2461228.708 +/- 0.0032) and inside Joanna's error bar too; the depth moves from a low-reading 0.98% to 1.47%, in agreement with the literature 1.44%. The 4.3.1 numbers stand in the history above as what the deprecated release made of the same frames. Also a full-transit control for EXOTIC#1387: Tmid lands inside the observing window at the correct epoch, consistent with the bug being ingress-only in scope. Still not submitted; checkpoint holds. BJD CORRECTION (2026-07-30): the audit that produced EXOTIC#1390 found every scripted run here (-ov -nea) carried a silently wrong barycentric time base: RA reached the converter as a sexagesimal string, barycorrpy failed, and the astropy fallback parsed hours as degrees, shifting BJD_TDB by -206 s for this target. Re-reduced under the fix (PR #1391): Tmid = 2461228.7064 +/- 0.0027 BJD_TDB (was 2461228.7046 under the bug), KTMF 4.17, QC PASS, zero fallback warnings. The corrected value sits 0.4 sigma from Richard Jaworski's independent 2461228.708 (was 0.8), i.e. the correction converges the independent reductions. Headline numbers updated to the corrected run.

Saturated: KELT-20 is V=7.6, too bright for the 6-inch scope (target core clipped at 4095 ADU); bright comparison stars sat near the frame edge and tracked out over the 6h window. No usable transit fit. A real failure, kept in the record. ADDENDUM 2026-07-27: this inits file ALSO carried the HAT-P-32 b sample ephemeris (P=2.15 d, not KELT-20 b's ~3.47 d), the same bug that misdiagnosed CoRoT-2. But KELT-20's rejection is SATURATION (V=7.6, core clipped at 4095 ADU), a per-frame fact independent of the transit phase, so unlike CoRoT-2 the rejection stands. Noted for full honesty about the bug's scope.

MARGINAL detection, and the misdiagnosis-overturn stands. The original ledger entry, 'no detection, 18.4% scatter, V=12.2 too faint', was a confident MISDIAGNOSIS: the inits carried the HAT-P-32 b SAMPLE period (2.15 d) not CoRoT-2 b's 1.743 d, so it searched the wrong phase and found noise (check_inits.py caught it). With the correct period the light curve is clean (~2% scatter, 78/80 frames) and a transit IS present where wrong-period noise was. BUT the honest verdict comes from WBoM (michael_fitzgeralds_wonderful_branch_of_magic; #1386 fixed), not the deprecated 4.3.1 I first ran: WBoM QC = MARGINAL, KTMF 3.27/5.00 (just over the 3.00 fail line), Delta BIC -4.55, EEBLS depth SNR 2.65. The Rp/R* posterior hugged the search bound and fell back to the prior (0.1667, data-only unc 0.0153) -- so the depth is NOT independently measured; my earlier 4.3.1 value 0.132 +/- 0.025 was a fit artifact of the capped sampler. Honest standing: a real but MARGINAL transit (a full transit, unlike TOI-1516's partial one, which is why this clears QC and that failed), depth unconstrained. Not submitted. The overturn is of the REJECTION's stated reason, not a promotion to a clean detection.

Day-1 end-to-end validation on shipped MicroObservatory sample; not for submission (already in literature)