Backyard telescopes and Internet help find new planets

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[The TrES program described in the article has a handful of 4-inch telescopes operating at different locations around the world, generating 10 Gigabytes of data every night. The telescopes are all fixed at the same star for several months. The data is then shipped over the Internet to a central computer where image-subtraction algorithm remove artifacts and correlate the data to detect the dimming caused by the extra-solar planets. One can easily envisage a whole global network of amateur astronomers linked by the Internet participating in such a program and significantly increasing our discovery rate of extra-solar planets. Excerpts from recent article astro biology magazine ,etc.   -- BSA]


http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1153.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0408/24newplanet/
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0408421

Could a new world be discovered with a department store telescope having only a small 4-inch diameter lens? It was a little more than a decade ago that the world's most powerful telescopes could just begin to discover extrasolar planets, but with over 120 new worlds found, the technique seems primed to become general.

A newfound planet detected by a small, 4-inch-diameter telescope demonstrates that we are at the cusp of a new age of planet
discovery.



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