Open Source Photometry Code Allows Amateur Astronomers To Detect Exoplanets 38
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."
Open the floodgates! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open the floodgates! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's news, what's "good" about it?
Like all scientific observation and understanding, the effect isn't of the immediate gratification variety we're so keen on in modern society; So it can be hard to see the good. But this is good; It will give us a much better basis for figuring out just how 'normal' our own solar system is, how common earth-like planets are, and perhaps with additional technological advances, where to send probes to search for life on other planets, or even someday to colonize with life. And not necessarily even human life -- we may just load up a probe with bacteria, amoeba, and other simple life and fire it at another planet... hoping that in a few million years, a viable ecosystem will have developed. Our legacy may not be us going to the stars, but rather the bacteria on our forks.
And besides learning more about how the universe is formed, these more detailed observations may open up avenues in physics -- dark matter is still not very well understood. The gravitational effects and whatnot may be too small to be noticable by observing stars... but if we get a few hundred thousand more data points out there that are much more sensitive to gravity waves... we may discover new physics, or confirm hypothesis, based on how these planets move, or gravitational lensing effects, etc.
It is indeed quite good -- and given how little investment is going into science these days... reducing the entry cost and operating costs of any area of scientific inquiry is much-needed.
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The AC stares blankly at his monitor. AC shifts in their comfortable chair and then takes a moment to swallow a highly specific quantity of painkiller to combat the headache that's been bothering them for the past few hours. Inadvertently, AC drops some food onto their lap; nomatter, the washing machine in combination with that stain remover will make short work of that come laundry day.
A thought flits into AC's head for a moment, something about where all this technology came from. A related concept goes s
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Thank you, good sir, I really needed a good laugh.
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AC shifts in their comfortable chair and then takes a moment to swallow a highly specific quantity of painkiller to combat the headache that's been bothering them for the past few hours.
Yes, I would imagine that having split personality can give you quite some headache.
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Thousands more exoplanets coming your way! Good news indeed.
I don't want even one exoplanet coming my way! I want them to stay in their own solar systems where they belong!
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Thousands more exoplanets coming your way! Good news indeed.
I don't want even one exoplanet coming my way! I want them to stay in their own solar systems where they belong!
Bonus point for reading with precision... ;-)
Tools like this combined with GPS time synchronized continent wide synthetic
aperture images could open new astronomy doors and windows of discovery.
As it is today exoplanets tell us little just as the discovery of the Higs tells us
commoners little.
Way back when science was the purview of the idle and the rich. With the modern
views of global economy many will be idle and many will be able to contribute
to science (seismic, weather, climate, astronomy, pollution,
Re: Open the floodgates! (Score:3)
"Hint: the required level of photometry is *hard* and the atmosphere makes it *very very very hard"
OTOH Kepler's instruments are 10 years old.
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Thousands of exoplanet candidates. Most amateur telescopes are way too weak to provide conclusive evidence.
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Dude, seriously, everybody already realises the Slashdot so-called editors are not fully stocked up in the talent department. However you know what's even more mind-numbing than the inane stories and substandard editing on this site? That's right, it's the people incessantly whining about the aforesaid deficiencies. Give it a rest already.
Re:Er... what? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Er... what? (Score:4, Informative)
Photometry is pretty trivial. GOOD photometry is less so, and good, easy to use photometry even less so. Photometry applied to planet hunting (longitudinal differential photometry with statistical analysis), which is what I assume OSCAAR does (the web page is a little unclear just how far it goes), is another couple of levels on top. OSCAAR's contribution might well be the planet hunting bit, not the photometry bit.
Telescopes and CCDs are cheap. Learning stats and signal processing is not.
Personally, I'd rather roll my own, but then stats and signal processing is what I do.
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There are several difficulties that someone has to overcome in order to make observations with high enough quality to be able to detect exoplanets. First, they need a reasonably large telescope with good optics and a dark site to use it. Second, they need a reliable and well-understood detector. Fortunately CCD detectors have become fairly cheap and easy to use over the past decade, so these are well within reach of a serious amateur astronomer. Third, they need to understand what types of observations
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You take a grammar course. "Opens up" has been used for a long time in this exact context: the European sea explorers opened up North and South America for colonization; land explorers opened up the west for settlement; it was hoped the Cape to Cairo road would open up the African continent.
Your usage is moderately weird, even today, and is certainly limited to the last ten or fifteen years. Claiming it's exclusive is simply wrong.
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Exoplanet-observing was an activity. The program opens that activity to people previously not able to perform it. Watching the sky != observing exoplanets. It was actually impossible to even try to detect exoplanets with affordable hardware, now it's possible. That equates to "opening up" a specific activity which is a subset of "watching the sky".
I hope that explains it for you...
There are lots of options (Score:2)
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IRAF has a very steep (and unforgiving) learning curve, and thus tends to be beyond most non-technical types. And the technical types are migrating to Pyraf.
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Pyraf is a Python module that wraps IRAF. It allows one to write scripts and use all of the power of Python and its packages when doing photometry. It is far easier to do complex analysis using Pyraf than using the IRAF cl. I still sometimes use IRAF scripts from years ago, but I have not written a new one in a long time.
big scopes (Score:3)
The program opens up exoplanet-observing to amateur astronomers and undergraduate students across the globe."
Yeah, but don't those with small telescopes just run into the same problem that asteroid observers have? New systems like Pan-STARRS with gigantic field of views and resolution can scan the whole sky very quickly and then a computer can simply analyze the superior data and come up with more numerous and more accurate discoveries...drowning out the discoveries from amateurs.
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The program opens up exoplanet-observing to amateur astronomers and undergraduate students across the globe."
Yeah, but don't those with small telescopes just run into the same problem that asteroid observers have? New systems like Pan-STARRS with gigantic field of views and resolution can scan the whole sky very quickly and then a computer can simply analyze the superior data and come up with more numerous and more accurate discoveries...drowning out the discoveries from amateurs.
Individual comet hunters still regularly make discoveries despite the existence of large-scale automated searches. The sky is a very big place and there are an awful lot of stars to monitor.
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