Discovering Extrasolar Planets in Your Backyard

RobertFisher writes: "As professional astronomers have continuned to build ever more powerful telescopes, the role of amateur astronomers has diminished substantially, mainly to monitoring variable stars and discovering comets. Now a group of professional astronomers at UC Santa Cruz are beginning an exciting new project, to discover extrasolar planets using a network of amateur astronomers who will monitor candidate stars for transits of extrasolar planets. From their website : '...the past several years have seen the introduction of highly affordable small telescopes equipped with sensitive and stable CCD (charge coupled device) detectors, and controlled by laptop computers. Thousands of amateur astronomers already own observatories which, when properly configured, are capable of reliably detecting the periodic dimming which occurs when a close-in giant planet passes in front of the parent star as seen from Earth.'"

Comments

If we find one, how named?

[Tablizer]

If an amature finds a planet that way, do they get to name it whatever they want, including things like "Micosoftbiteme" or "OOPsucksEggs"?

Or it is a group effort where the data is shared and no one person gets sole naming credit?

I suppose one could pick a star set and monitor them all by themselves. However, one can only do this at night. If the transits happen during the day, you might miss them. Plus, atmospheric angle may affect the results, greatly limiting accurate light level monitoring. (Multiple observers can be used to average out such discrepancy.)

Still, I suppose one could get some buddies or family members abroad to set up such scopes in multiple locations around the world.

Then again, that is a lot of effort just to get a planet named whatever they want it to be named. It might make more sense to hunt comets using that method if you really want naming credit.

Another problem is that they name the comet after your name rather than your preference, so I could not call it "OOPsucksEgss Comet" after all. Well, I suppose I could get may name legally changed to "Mr. OOPsucksEggs", and *then* discover a comet. But, that is getting carried away I suppose.

But it must be wacky hopes similar to these which motivate so many amateur astronomers to spend tens of K on such equipment. Either that they are not married and have no kids and don't get off on sports cars, so where else are they gonna spend the money?

Wealthy single geeks on shopping sprees. What a concept.