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Open Source Photometry Code Allows Amateur Astronomers To Detect Exoplanets
An anonymous reader writes "Have access to a telescope with a CCD? Now you can make your very own exoplanet transit curves. Brett Morris, a student from the University of Maryland, has written an open source photometry application known as Oscaar. In a recent NASA Press Release, Morris writes: "The purpose of a differential photometry code – the differential part – is to compare the changes in brightness of one star to another nearby. That way you can remove changes in stellar brightness due to the Earth's atmosphere. Our program measures the brightness change of all the stars in the telescope's field of view simultaneously, so you can pull out the change in brightness that you see from the planet-hosting star due to the transit event." The program opens up exoplanet-observing to amateur astronomers and undergraduate students across the globe."
The 2002 Barrack Obama - Updated
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz Samantha Power and Susan Rice and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove David Axelrod to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein Bashar Assad. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi Syrian people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam Assad poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi Syrian economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi Syrian military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
The program opens up exoplanet-observing to amateur astronomers and undergraduate students across the globe."
This makes it sound like you previously had to buy a license to look up. -_- Astronomy is one of the few things that can't be "opened up" by corporate interests... you can't patent the sky. Yet. You were already able to do this, so let's phrase it correctly; "The program reduces the entry cost of exoplanet-observing for interested members of the public."
Slashdot... please, take a grammar course. Or if that's too hard, an introduction to editing in journalism. Your (decreasing) active membership here thanks you.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie