Ground-based Light Curve Follow-up Observations of TESS Object of Interest (TOI) 3649.01

TOI-3649.01 was a potential exoplanet candidate identified by TESS due to its deep observable transit. Light-based photometry was needed to be able to verify whether this transit-like event could have been explained by other celestial events. The goal of this analysis is to perform a photometric follow up on TESS candidate TOI 3649 on January 4, 2024 to characterize the periodic signal. TOI-3549.01 has a predicted radius of about 13.4 earth radii and a predicted period of 3.26 days. Through ground-based telescope photometry from George Mason University Observatory, generation of a high-precision light curve was possible. A light curve was generated from 75 viable data points after over 50% of the observations were discarded due to telescope angling issues. However, the remaining results showed a transit-like event with a depth of 8.13 ppt. There were also no significant positional shifts recorded when analyzing centroid. The detected signal is consistent with a previously identified Nearby Eclipsing Binary (NEB), calling a false positive on the exoplanet candidate. However, analysis on the light curve identifies no closely related NEB that caused the light curve dip. Part of which could be attributed to the low signal-to-noise ratio of the limited dataset.