Planet Discovered Using Telephoto Camera Lenses

[rvr] writes "The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) reports the discovery of an extra-solar planet called XO-1b, which orbits a dim star in Corona Borealis every 4 days. To find it, the brightness of several thousand stars were regularly scanned using two mini-telescopes in Hawaii. This equipment was built using commercial hardware: two digital cameras, attached to telephoto camera lenses on a robotic equatorial mount. A team of amateur astronomers helped with their own equipment to discard or confirm dozens of suspected transits."

Tight Orbit

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

This Jupiter-like planet appears to be a pretty weird case. An orbit lasts 4 days, an object as large as that with an orbit as short as that must be relatively easy to discover. I suppose the thing will not be around much longer anyway - it will impact the sun there.

Re:Real ingenuity

[pimpimpim]

A lot of "amateurs" actually do work that is too much of a hassle for current science. E.g. mineralogy is mainly done by amateurs these days.

I think this current news item is very good for everyone, it shows that technology (and the abbility to develop software easily and freely) actually will help to "democratize" science, making it possible for less rich groups (e.g. in developing countries, or just groups of interested amateurs) to make refreshing contributions to science! This is a good thing, as science tends to move away from the general public, getting more complicated and requiring more investments in precize equipement by the day.

my only concern is if peer reviews take place in this 'amateur' science. As all scientists, everyone wants to have a big discovery, and there is a big need to check on this if no-one tries to claim success before thorougly checking it. This urge will be no worse, no less than in "real science", but I'm just not sure if there has or will be done any checking of the results in this case. Will they publish this (I read the article half, didn't see a mention of it).

Don't need a telephoto at all

[gurutc]

To show my folks how good their middle of the line $300 Fuji 5200 camera was I set it on the roof of my car and did a high resolution .5 second exposure of Jupiter. Then I took the cam inside, loaded the pic on the pc, and zoomed it in to show them the moons of Jupiter and some of the cloud colors on Jupiter itself.

The Canon EF 200mm F2.8 L II triumphs again

[heroine]

Those 200mm lenses are truly underappreciated masterpieces. They are so over engineered, they can exceed telescopes for most wide field astronomy. Unlike most telescopes of equivalent quality, the EF 200mm is portable.

As time progresses and more people can afford digital SLR's, the EF 200mm F2.8 L II is going to make a lot of astonomical discoveries.

Re:Real ingenuity

[doubletruncation]

Actually they need to use small telescopes for this kind of project simply because large telescopes won't work. Only 1% of Sun-like stars will have a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting with a period less than ~10 days, and only 10% of these will transit from our point of view. So they need to look at ~1000 sun-like stars to have a chance of getting a single transiting hot jupiter. They're particularly interesting in finding these planets around bright stars since then you can hope to do interesting follow-up like measuring their atmospheres and reflected light. The point is, that to have any chance of finding such a planet around a bright star they need to look at very large fields of view - typically for these kind of surveys a single image will be 5 to 10 degrees on a side (which is 10 to 20 times the diameter of the full moon). It's incredibly difficult to get a very large field of view with a big telescope (for a 6 meter telescope the largest field of view camera that has been built covers half a degree by half a degree), so for this type of project small, cheap, off-the-wall telescopes are the best tools for the job. There are, in fact, a number of similar surveys using small telescopes to look for these things, and a planet (Tres-1) has already been found this way.