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Full list of authors: Christian, Sam; Vanderburg, Andrew; Becker, Juliette; Yahalomi, Daniel A.; Pearce, Logan; Zhou, George ; Collins, Karen A.; Kraus, Adam L.; Stassun, Keivan G.; de Beurs, Zoe; Ricker, George R.; Vanderspek, Roland K.; Latham, David W.; Winn, Joshua N.; Seager, S.; Jenkins, Jon M.; Abe, Lyu; Agabi, Karim; Amado, Pedro J.; Baker, David; Barkaoui, Khalid; Benkhaldoun, Zouhair; Benni, Paul; Berberian, John; Berlind, Perry; Bieryla, Allyson; Esparza-Borges, Emma; Bowen, Michael; Brown, Peyton; Buchhave, Lars A.; Burke, Christopher J.; Buttu, Marco; Cadieux, Charles; Caldwell, Douglas A.; Charbonneau, David; Chazov, Nikita; Chimaladinne, Sudhish; Collins, Kevin I.; Combs, Deven; Conti, Dennis M.; Crouzet, Nicolas; de Leon, Jerome P.; Deljookorani, Shila; Diamond, Brendan; Doyon, René; Dragomir, Diana; Dransfield, Georgina; Essack, Zahra; Evans, Phil; Fukui, Akihiko; Gan, Tianjun; Esquerdo, Gilbert A.; Gillon, Michaël; Girardin, Eric; Guerra, Pere; Guillot, Tristan; K. Habich, Eleanor Kate; Henriksen, Andreea; Hoch, Nora; Isogai, Keisuke I.; Jehin, Emmanuël; Jensen, Eric L. N.; Johnson, Marshall C.; Livingston, John H.; Kielkopf, John F.; Kim, Kingsley; Kawauchi, Kiyoe; Krushinsky, Vadim; Kunzle, Veronica; Laloum, Didier; Leger, Dominic; Lewin, Pablo; Mallia, Franco; Massey, Bob; Mori, Mayuko; McLeod, Kim K.; Mékarnia, Djamel; Mireles, Ismael; Mishevskiy, Nikolay; Tamura, Motohide; Murgas, Felipe; Narita, Norio; Naves, Ramon; Nelson, Peter; Osborn, Hugh P.; Palle, Enric; Parviainen, Hannu; Plavchan, Peter; Pozuelos, Francisco J.; Rabus, Markus; Relles, Howard M.; Rodríguez López, Cristina; Quinn, Samuel N.; Schmider, Francois-Xavier; Schlieder, Joshua E.; Schwarz, Richard P.; Shporer, Avi; Sibbald, Laurie; Srdoc, Gregor; Stibbards, Caitlin; Stickler, Hannah; Suarez, Olga; Stockdale, Chris; Tan, Thiam-Guan; Terada, Yuka; Triaud, Amaury; Tronsgaard, Rene; Waalkes, William C.; Wang, Gavin; Watanabe, Noriharu; Wenceslas, Marie-Sainte; Wingham, Geof; Wittrock, Justin; Ziegler, Carl.--This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited., Astronomers do not have a complete picture of the effects of wide-binary companions (semimajor axes greater than 100 au) on the formation and evolution of exoplanets. We investigate these effects using new data from Gaia Early Data Release 3 and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission to characterize wide-binary systems with transiting exoplanets. We identify a sample of 67 systems of transiting exoplanet candidates (with well-determined, edge-on orbital inclinations) that reside in wide visual binary systems. We derive limits on orbital parameters for the wide-binary systems and measure the minimum difference in orbital inclination between the binary and planet orbits. We determine that there is statistically significant difference in the inclination distribution of wide-binary systems with transiting planets compared to a control sample, with the probability that the two distributions are the same being 0.0037. This implies that there is an overabundance of planets in binary systems whose orbits are aligned with those of the binary. The overabundance of aligned systems appears to primarily have semimajor axes less than 700 au. We investigate some effects that could cause the alignment and conclude that a torque caused by a misaligned binary companion on the protoplanetary disk is the most promising explanation. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society., The IRSF project is a collaboration between Nagoya University and the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas (A) (grant Nos. 10147207 and 10147214) and Optical & Near-Infrared Astronomy Inter-University Cooperation Program, from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP18H05439, and JST PRESTO grant No. JPMJPR1775, and a University Research Support Grant from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). This work is partly supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows, grant No. JP20J21872. This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP17H04574. This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP20K14518, and by Astrobiology Center SATELLITE Research project AB022006. M.T. is supported by MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI grant Nos. 18H05442, 15H02063, and 22000005. This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP21K13955. This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. 20K14521. C.R.-L. acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa award for the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). M.R. acknowledges support from the Universidad Católica de lo Santísima Concepción grant DI-FIAI 03/2021. P.J.A. acknowledges support from grant AYA2016-79425-C3-3-P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the Centre of Excellence "Severo Ochoa" award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). This paper is based on observations made with the T150 telescope at the Sierra Nevada Observatory (Granada, Spain), operated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA—CSIC). The research leading to these results has received funding from the ARC grant for Concerted Research Actions, financed by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. TRAPPIST is funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique, FNRS) under the grant FRFC 2.5.594.09.F. TRAPPIST-North is a project funded by the University of Liège (Belgium), in collaboration with Cadi Ayyad University of Marrakech (Morocco). D.D. acknowledges support from the TESS Guest Investigator Program grant No. 80NSSC19K1727 and NASA Exoplanet Research Program grant No. 18-2XRP18_2-0136. M.G. and E.J. are F.R.S.-FNRS Senior Research Associates. K.K.M. acknowledges support from the New York Community Trust's Fund for Astrophysical Research. This work has been carried out within the framework of the NCCR PlanetS supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

We present a unique implementation of Python coding in an asynchronous object-oriented programming (OOP) framework to fully automate the process of collecting data with the George Mason University (GMU) Observatory's 0.8-meter telescope. The goal of this project is to perform automated follow-up observations for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, while still allowing for human control, monitoring, and adjustments. Prior to our implementation, the facility was computer-controlled by a human observer through a combination of webcams, TheSkyX, ASCOM Dome, MaxIm DL, and a weather station. We have automated slews and dome movements, CCD exposures, saving FITS images and metadata, initial focusing, guiding on the target, using the ambient temperature to adjust the focus as the telescope cools through the rest of the night, taking calibration images (darks and flats), and monitoring local weather data. The automated weather monitor periodically checks various weather data from multiple sources to automate the decision to close the observatory during adverse conditions. We have organized the OOP code structure in such a way that each hardware device or important higher-level process is categorized as its own object class or "module" with associated attributes and methods, with inherited common methods across modules for code reusability. To allow actions to be performed simultaneously across different modules, we implemented a multithreaded approach where each module is given its own CPU thread on which to operate concurrently with all other threads. After the initial few modules (camera, telescope, dome, data I/O) were developed, further development of the code was carried out in tandem with testing on sky on clear nights. The code, in its current state, has been tested and used for observations on 171 nights, with more planned usage and feature additions., Comment: 69 pages, 17 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems