Plavchan, PeterJoseph, Samuel T.2024-04-172024-04-172023-10http://hdl.handle.net/1920/13593https://doi.org/10.13021/MARS/2053The objective of this study is to determine if TESS object of interest TOI 3779.01 is an exoplanet which is currently classified as a possible candidate in the NASA Exoplanet Archive. The raw telescope data of TOI 3779.01 was collected from the GMU Observatory. These images were reduced, plate solved, and aligned using AstroImageJ to generate a light curve of TOI 3779.01’s transit. There is a dimming of the host star during the transit period, however, since there was notable light pollution during the observational night and nearby reference stars failed the NEB (Nearby Eclipsing Binary) check, the aperture could have been contaminated. To find the planet-to-star radius ratio of TOI 3779.01 we first used the transit depth (6.93 ppt) calculated from our transit model in AstroImageJ to get a ratio value of 0.083246. Using the transit model ratio and transit depth, the radius of TOI 3779.01 is 0.09152 R☉(stellar radius). This value comes close with two other estimates: the first is using the TESS predicted transit depth (8.8) which yielded 0.103189 R☉ and the other is a python probabilistic model which predicted 0.037. These calculations assumes that the stellar radius of the host star is 1.1 R☉. Based on the large radius, we classified TOI 3779.01 as a Hot Jupiter. However, since the aperture was contaminated, the findings of this study can be further used by the TESS team to do more research employing other methods like spectroscopy and chromaticity.en-USCopyright 2023 Samuel T. JosephGround-based light curve follow-up validation observations of TESS object of interest TOI 3779.01Project