The Small Telescope Extrasolar Transit Search (STExTS) project involves undergraduates in research using ground-based small aperture, wide-angle telescopes to search for transiting exoplanets of stars down to 13th magnitude. The observational campaigns in 2015 and 2016 used the Monroe Observatory of the University of North Texas with a f=1.5 152 mm astrograph installed for remote observing and in 2017 twin f=1.25 152 mm astrographs were remotely accessed at the Dark Sky Observatory Collective (DSOC) near Ft. Davis, TX. Hardware and the use of commercial software for remote operation of the telescope and camera were installed and coordinated by the team. Observational campaigns usually run 25 to 35 nights, capturing 5000+ stars per image, 250 image per night of the same region of the sky. A software processing pipeline and SQL database were created for the searches. The pipeline examines the images, calibrates them, extracts the stars, and matches each star with an astronomical catalog of stars for identification. Finally a complex photometric analysis is performed to measure the light curve of every star, the results of which are stored in the project SQL database hosted by the University of Dallas. PERANSO and VARTOOLs are used to analyze the light curve and to identify stars of interest. The STExTS team has found six candidates for exoplanets, as well as discovering numerous new RR Lyrae variable stars and W UMa binaries. The process of converting the astrograph to remote u Robotic Telescopes, Student Research and Education (RTSRE) Proceedings Conference Proceedings, San Diego, California, USA, Jun 18-21, 2017 Fitzgerald, M., James, C.R., Buxner, S., White, S., Eds. Vol. 1, No. 1, (2018) ISBN 978-0-6483996-0-5 / doi : 10.32374/rtsre.2017.032 / CC BY-NC-ND license Peer Reviewed Article. rtsre.net/ojs Using Remote Telescopes for Exoplanet Searches Richard P . Olenick1*, Arthur Sweeney1, Laura Aumen 1, 2, Ramses Gonzalez1, 3, Alex Henderson1, 3, Mark Rodriguez1, Philip Lenzen1, John Paul Jones1 Abstract The Small Telescope Extrasolar Transit Search (STExTS) project involves undergraduates in research using ground-based small aperture, wide-angle telescopes to search for hot Jupiter- size transiting exoplanets of stars down to 13th magnitude. The observational campaigns in 2015 and 2016 used the Monroe Observatory of the University of North Texas with a f/1.5 152 mm astrograph installed for remote observing and in 2017 twin f/1.25 152 mm astrographs were remotely accessed at the Dark Sky Observatory Collective (DSOC) near Ft. Davis, TX. Hardware and the use of commercial software for remote operation of the telescope and camera were installed and coordinated by the team. Observational campaigns usually run 25 to 35 nights, capturing 5000+ stars per image, 250 images per night of the same region of the sky. A software processing pipeline and SQL database were created for the searches. The pipeline examines the images, calibrates them, extracts the stars, and matches each star with an astronomical catalog of stars for identification. Finally photometric analysis is performed to measure the light curve of every star, the results of which are stored in the project SQL database hosted by the University of Dallas. PERANSO and VARTOOLs are used to analyze the light curve and to identify stars of interest. The process of converting the astrograph to remote use, the development of the data pipeline, the role of student researchers, and a new exoplanet candidate, GSC 2087-1126 b, are presented. Keywords techniques: photometric; methods: data analysis; planets and satellites: detection 1Department of Physics, University of Dallas, Irving TX USA 2Department of Physics, Creighton University , Omaha NE USA 3University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC USA *Corresponding author: olenick@udallas.edu Introduction Exoplanets with large magnitude depths often transit bright host stars, allowing ground-based, photometric measurements of flux over time to be acquired with differential photometry on even modest astronomical equipment. Since the first transiting exoplanet discovery by Charbonneau (Charbonneau et al., 1999) in 1999 several ground based small telescope search projects have succeeded in finding numerous exoplanets, most notably W ASP (Cameron et al., 2007) and KELT (Pepper et al., 2007), through the transit method. The transit depth scales as ( ∆F F ) ≈ 0.01 ( r RJ )2( R RSun )−2 , (1) where r and R are the planet and star radii, respectively. For Jupiter transiting the Sun, taking Jupiter’s radius asRJ≈ 0.1RSun, the transit depth is ∼ 1%. For an edge-on orbit, the transit time is given by Using Remote Telescopes for Exoplanet Searches — 336 Figure 3. The nightly routine followed by undergraduates taking data indicating the software components utilized by them. from the GSC 1.1 star catalog, PinPoint obtains an astrometric solution for the plate (image). PinPoint is configured to load subsequently Source Extractor (SExtractor) (Bertin and Arnouts, 1996). SExtractor is a program that builds a catalog of objects from an astronomical image using the USNO-B1.0 catalog. Although it is particularly oriented towards reduction of large scale galaxy-survey data, with thresholds and nets adjusted, it performs reasonably well on moderately crowded star fields. SExtractor extracts the (x,y) position of each star and passes this, along with its measured magnitude, back to PinPoint. Given the right ascension and declination, a local catalog is generated of the field area from the USNO-B1.0 catalog that is accessed to identify each star. The locally generated catalog is necessary because PinPoint does not provide the name of all of extracted stars. We use the VizieR Catalog Service to download and create a subset catalog based on the centers of our plates and their field of view of about 3 degrees. A raw data SQL file is created that contains data on each processed image and a raw data file that contains data on