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.

Comments

Billions and billions:

[Hartree]

"550,000 million dollar Kepler space telescope"

I think you're about 3 orders of magnitude too high.

Re:Billions and billions:

[abies]

Yes, for example when filling out census in Russia, it is very important to put that you have 2,000 children (Lena and Igor). If you put just 2, people would consider that you are just rounding it off.
This even appears in the food market - you need to specify that you want to buy 1,000 egg, otherwise, given current economic troubles, they could cheat you and try to sell you only 0,945 of one, which you would notice only at home when your cake fails.

And making my link a link:

[robbak]

The more complete source article

Re:And making my link a link:

[butalearner]

The more complete source article

As someone posted below, here is the forum post with some data, and here is the raw data with more plots. This is really awesome, but you have to temper your enthusiasm when you realize he knew exactly when to look and how much the brightness should drop, and he chose a relatively bright star (apparent magnitude +7.676, which is just barely too faint to see with the naked eye) with a relatively large exoplanet to image. There is some wiggle room there, but the data is pretty noisy, so it will be pretty tough to spot new exoplanets like this.

In comparison, Kepler-67b is a confirmed exoplanet 3610 light years away, orbiting a star with an apparent magnitude of +16. That is, take the light received from the star this guy imaged, divide it by 2000 (less than 0.05% the brightness), and Kepler can still detect exoplanets passing in front of it. The Hubble and Keck Telescopes have imaged stars with magnitudes of +30 or higher. So to answer the headline (in case it wasn't already obvious), we still kinda need NASA.

Who needs NASA? David Schneider does.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You too can discover Jupiter's moons using only

[Spy Handler]

a smartphone and an app!

Well ok so some Italian already discovered Jupiter's moons, but if they hadn't, you could!

Re:You too can discover Jupiter's moons using only

[Dogtanian]

Even with Slashdot's slightly hyperbolic headline, the summary correctly reports the planet as having been "detected" rather then "discovered", and clarifies that this was "only" an already-discovered exoplanet (as does the original article).

If that was your implied criticism, then, it's not valid.

If you understood this, but your point was that "detecting" an already-known exo-planet was pointless because it's alredy been done... even though the person involved did it with equipment orders of magnitude cheaper and lower-end than that originally used by NASA less than a decade back, and which few of us would have assumed possible, which *is* the point here... then Slashdot probably isn't the place for you.

Re:Ditch the DSLR

[hawguy]

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?

Because by the time my camera gets around to taking several photos at various focal lengths, the fast moving subject I was trying to take a picture of already left the scene. But I have the opposite problem (since I can fake a shallow depth of field in photoshop) -- I have to open the lens all the way on my P&S in any kind of low-light situation since the sensor is too noisy at high ISO's, so I end up with a shallower depth of field than I wanted.

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?

I want a fast lens *and* a larger, lower noise sensor than I can find in most P&S cameras. But I don't use that fast lens for taking pictures of planets or the moon.

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.

Right, all those sports photographers that use the big $8000+ 300mm telephoto lenses could save some money and just get a point a shoot with more pixels than his 20MP DSLR and he can just crop down the pictures to give him a nice 3MP shot of the winning touchdown. Pixels are pixels, right? The 1/2" sensor on a 20MP point-and-shoot is just as good as the 35mm sensor on his DSLR, right? And what possible difference could there be between an $8000 lens and the lens on a $500 P&S?

Want to shoot movies? Do you see any pros using DSLRs? They use a Red or similar, not a Canon EOS.

Here's a list of 30 movies and TV shows that have been shot in whole or part on Canon or Nikon DSLRs:

http://www.imdb.com/list/ls059...

I must admit in skeptical

[Chrisq]

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