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It's great for NASA that Kepler will continue operating in the ecliptic plane, where the newly discovered exoplanets might also see the Earth transit the Sun!

The bad news behind the headline is that Kepler's second life will be "community driven", which is a polite way of saying there is essentially no funding for science, just operations. The Senior Review Panel report (pdf) notes:

"The operation of the nation's space borne observatories is so severely impacted by the current funding climate in Washington that ... American pre-eminence in the study of the Universe from space is threatened to the point of irreparable damage if additional funds cannot be found to fill the projected funding gaps."

The response from NASA (pdf) acknowledges:

"The Kepler mission extension is approved for FY 2015-FY 2016 for K2 operations at a 10-percent reduction from the requested level; the full request cannot be accommodated within the constrained budget conditions."

If you love what Kepler has done, you can help support some of the scientists behind the discoveries through their Non-profit Adopt a Star program.

Thanks. If it is KIC10593626 then you should see it np at that site assuming it's visible from where you are since it's apparent magnitude is almost 12. http://palebluedot.whitedwarf.org/stars/10593626 I have a MK-66 which is a 6" Mak-Cass and can see up to about magnitude 12 in my yard on a good night, and about 15 at a dark spot. A 20" on a dark site should go well beyond that in the high teens.

Anyone notice that Stephen Colbert has apparently already adopted an exoplanet-bearing star? Perhaps its the future site of the Colbert Nation. http://whitedwarf.org/palebluedot/planets.html

Funny story: when Willem Luyten applied for federal funding to host the first conference on White Dwarf Stars, the application got bounced, since he hadn't filled out all the proper forms for doing scientific studies of human subjects!

They're actually called "white dwarfs" not "white dwarves" to help avoid confusion.

For all kinds of Ph.D. theses and more, visit http://whitedwarf.org/

Cheers,
Matt Wood, Professor
Dept Physics & Space Sciences
Florida Institute of Technology
Melbourne, FL 32935
wood@fit.edu

The next logical step would be to build 3 or 4 identical scopes in each hemisphere. This would let you observe an object 24hrs a day (with a redundant observatory, perhaps, in case of clouds). The Whole Earth Telescope (WET) does just this to study asteroseismology with ~10 telescopes. Read about it here. (They also use a pretty cool metacomputing Linux system for data analysis. The other really cool thing about this group is that all their data is "open-sourced", i.e., publicly available to anyone that wants it, immediately.