Description
Here we explore the capabilities of NASA's 3.0 m Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) and SpeX spectrometer and the 5.08 m Hale telescope with the TripleSpec spectrometer with near-infrared H-, K-, and L-band measurements of HD 209458b's secondary eclipse. Our IRTF/SpeX data are the first absolute L-band spectroscopic emission measurements of any exoplanet other than the hot Jupiter HD 189733b. Previous measurements of HD 189733b's L band indicate bright emission hypothesized to result from non-LTE CH_4_{nu}_3_ fluorescence. We do not detect a similar bright 3.3 {mu}m feature to ~3{sigma}, suggesting that fluorescence does not need to be invoked to explain HD 209458b's L-band measurements. The validity of our observation and reduction techniques, which decrease the flux variance by up to 2.8 orders of magnitude, is reinforced by 1{sigma} agreement with existent Hubble/NICMOS and Spitzer/IRAC1 observations that overlap the H, K, and L bands, suggesting that both IRTF/SpeX and Palomar/TripleSpec can measure an exoplanet's emission with high precision.
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