NEAR-INFRARED THERMAL EMISSION DETECTIONS OF A NUMBER OF HOT JUPITERS AND THE SYSTEMATICS OF GROUND-BASED NEAR-INFRARED PHOTOMETRY∗

We present detections of the near-infrared thermal emission of three hot Jupiters and one brown dwarf using the Wide-field Infrared Camera (WIRCam) on the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). These include Ks-band secondary eclipse detections of the hot Jupiters WASP-3b and Qatar-1b and the brown dwarf KELT-1b. We also report Y-band, KCONT-band, and two new and one reanalyzed Ks-band detections of the thermal emission of the hot Jupiter WASP-12b. We present a new reduction pipeline for CFHT/WIRCam data, which is optimized for high precision photometry. We also describe novel techniques for constraining systematic errors in ground-based near-infrared photometry, so as to return reliable secondary eclipse depths and uncertainties. We discuss the noise properties of our ground-based photometry for wavelengths spanning the near-infrared (the YJHK bands), for fain