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Who Needs NASA? Exoplanet Detected Using a DSLR
Iddo Genuth writes Until 20 years ago even the best telescopes in the world could not detect a planet outside our solar system. Now, with the aid of a basic DSLR, low cost lens and some DIY magic, you just might be able to "see" ET's home planet for yourself. Your DSLR can do much more than just take a few nice portraits or the occasional vacation photos – if you have some DIY experience (O.K. a bit more than just "some"), you might be able to repeat what David Schneider was recently been able to do — that is, building his own planet finder using only inexpensive photo gear, low cost electronics, the right kind of software and a lot of patience. Although Schneider was "only" able to rediscover an already known exsoplanet (some 63 light-years away from us), what he did — and more importantly how he did it — might allow planet hunting to become closer to SETI@home than NASA's 550,000 million dollar Kepler space telescope project.
"550,000 million dollar Kepler space telescope"
I think you're about 3 orders of magnitude too high.
It does make for good television though. Watching things go boom always does.
Not you, that's for sure! OK here's the deal, brotha. Sign up for Niggercare and you get a complete single-payer health plan. Got a medical bill needs paying? Niggercare pays $0.01 and the rest of yo bill is your co-payment. Simple as shit, nigga.
"Who needs NASA?"
wtf kind headline is that?
The actual article is here, on ieee.og
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/diy-exoplanet-detector?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IeeeSpectrumFullText+%28IEEE+Spectrum+Full+Text%29
The more complete source article
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
This is a really cool project, with a terrible headline. Without NASA (or perhaps the ESA, or whatever space organization first found this exoplanet), David Schneider wouldn't have been able to look up the timing for the planet's transit. He wouldn't even have know to try taking pictures of that particular star. He'd have to take a lot more photos over a much longer time, over a much bigger area of the sky, and run a lot more image comparision software for a lot longer, before he's have found that transit.
a smartphone and an app!
Well ok so some Italian already discovered Jupiter's moons, but if they hadn't, you could!
An ordinary camera is simply not that sensitive.
A very nice use of existing and well known technologies and some clever manufacturing of other parts. "Well done that man!" as my father would say. Of course the naysayers who have't done a fucking thing as nifty as this will be "blah blah blah......".
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/...
DSLR are jack of all trades/master of none cameras and its good to see someone using it for something that finally it is good at!
Seriously, a DSLR sensor is 35mm because the film it replaced is 35mm. It's not an engineering choice, it was done so that owners of expensive lenses could use them on the new digital cameras. That needed it to support 35mm, so that is why the sensor is 35mm. Its not sized large enough to take in a normal range of light, and yet small enough to keep the lens size down so big zoom lenses are possible. It's sized for historic reasons, making it too big and thus limited.
The lenses in DSLR's correct for all manner of barrel distortions and aberrations, this is because film could not do that correction. Computers attached to sensors can. Each one of those fixup lenses adds weight and cuts light. Lots of things are better done by digital calculation than lenses. So keeping those lenses with their problems was not a good choice.
Want a shallow depth of field? Think you need a large lens / fast lens? Why? When the computer can take multiple photos at different focal lengths and calculate the depth properly. Why twiddle with zoom and f-stop?
Want a fast lens? Point and shoots go down to f1.8 now. I can photograph the craters on the moon with a pocket sized G7X without a tripod FFS. How often do you try to detect planets in other solar systems?
Want multiple lenses for those oddball occasions, go with Micro 4/3 like a lot of pros are doing now.
As sensors have gotten better, and lower noise, the sensor in the DSLR has not shrunk in size because of the lens. Big zoom lens are unworkable in DSLR because of the size of the sensors, they would simply be too long. Likewise the size of the sensor is a big problem itself, its slow electrically. So you end up with a camera with worse performance in normal situations, and designed for non-real world situations. Trying to find planets literally is what these camera are useful for!
Want to shoot wildlife at a distance? Think your DSLR is the best option? Think again, you should be using a higher pixel camera at a lower zoom, because you'll have difficulty tracking the moving object at high zoom with that lumping great lens.
Want to shoot movies? Do you see any pros using DSLRs? They use a Red or similar, not a Canon EOS.
My point is the DSLR is a jack-of-all trades, master-of-none camera and there are better options now for jack of all trades cameras.
He's built his own tracking mount, which is nice, but many astrophotographers do this and you can also buy gear that will do it for you. This isn't new in any way. What's different is that he's shown he can detect a star's dimming due to an exoplanet pass using cheap detector gear. That's more impressive. You can see his raw data here.
soylentnews.org
To actually *go* there!
"Honey, I just discovered a planet and I'm going to name it after you. An entire planet."
Table-ized A.I.
If the article is correct it's only useful for checking transit events. The article talks about "a target star". "A star" has a low probability of having a planet in an orbit that gives transit events. Depending on the orbit of the planet it is next to 0 to 10%.
That is why the expensive systems check many stars at once. Kepler monitors 145,000 stars at once
That doesn't mean much. NASA always lacks money to do awesome stuff. So I feel that cost is a good metric here:
Kepler monitors 145,000 stars and costed $600,000,000. That means $4,138 per star
This costs $300 + $100 + some work = +/- $500 per star. If the same software could be used then it might be possible to check more stars with a single DSLR. Maybe even a hundred.
That means $6 per star (naively assuming his setup is sufficient for large scale deployment)
I say: if and when Kepler dies we should stick a couple of them on every observatory we have and have full time monitoring across the planet. False positives drop with more data.
False negatives would still require different detection methods since most exoplanets don't transit. However if we have this set up we might be able to add thousands of spectrometers to it to detect Doppler shift events. Then the only planets with low detection chance are the ones where we look directly on the top (or bottom) of their orbit.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I really want to think that this was a great feat of hardware hacking, but the title of the summary is terrible. The capabilities of space telescopes are designed to overcome the obstacles which plague our earth-bound ones.
Saying that this is a viable replacement for the data coming from a source with lesser disturbances is just undermining the work of a lot of people.
I must admit in skeptical. It is very easy to "see" something that you know is there in data, eliminating runs that you "know" are wrong, etc. Until this is reproduced by someone with similar equipment I will put this down to a fluke
Defund NASA now and cut taxes.
One cannot escape the fact that bigger apperture telescopes can record fainter
stars, and/or perfom the photometry of bright stars with more precision than a simple camera.
To detect exoplanets one needs both large samples of stars recorded as continuously as
possible over several years and high precision photometry. Besides being cheap, the advantage
of a small camera is than the field is larger. But with a larger telescope in space like Kepler one
can target regions of the sky with density of stars optimal for the CCD/camera combination, and
observe continuously for months with the same instruments, which is crucial for differential
photometry. Thousands of amateurs worldwide detecting as many new exoplantes as Kepler
would face the problem of coordinating the analysis of huge amounts of heterogeneous and
incomplete data (due to day/night and weather interruptions in differently dark and transparent skies).
The real question is wether crowdsourcing planet detection is cheaper for global economy at equal scientific return than with state sponsored research. Perhaps the most important benefit of such an
activity is educational and promotional for research in general.
This is a nice excercise in performing wide-field astrophotography and photometry with simple equipment but...
The article does not provide a lightcurve.
He already knew where and when to look so he accounts any magnitude variations to the presence of an exoplanet. In reality, can he tell the difference between variable stars and stars with exoplanets by only looking at his data?
Also it is sad that the article describes 99% his camera setup and 1% (or less) his data processing workflow.
Americans...
Only to find out later that it's just a speck of dust on the CCD.
Many amateurs have already contributed to the effort. Variable Star Observers(VSO) have been collecting information for a very long time. This information has been useful for much more than just the search for exoplanets. Taking part in VSO efforts is one of the few ways that private individuals in their spare time can make real contributions to data used by current day scientists.
> Also it is sad that the article describes 99% his camera setup and 1% (or less) his data processing workflow.
Well it was on a photography site, not an astrophysics or computing site....
When DIY'ers start sending rovers to Mars and probes to Pluto, then we can ditch NASA...
A DSLR has managed to detect a large planet in a fast orbit around a small, close star. Kepler is sensitive enough to detect earth-sized planets orbiting G-type stars at 1AU, A DSLR (or even conventional telescope) can't replicate that.
I suspect most (all?) of the transiting planets that today's DSLRs could detect have probably already been detected by sky surveys anyway.
Technology keeps getting better, we don't need space anymore!
Come on, really? In a story about exoplanets you can't even spell exoplanet??
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Slashdot Deal in the future.
comets, asteriods and novas. We could have a very large group of people with each small group responible for a small section of ths sky.
That question was asked by Bruce L. Gary and the answer is what he wrote in his free book: EXOPLANET OBSERVING
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