Backyard Telescopes Find Extrasolar Planet?

[Blue Fire]

Modified Backyard Telescopes Find Extrasolar Planet
By Ker Than
Staff Writer
posted: 08 September 2006
12:04 am ET

A planet slightly larger than Jupiter was recently spotted as it passed in front of a Sun-like star 500-light-years away. Called TrES-2, the new extrasolar planet is the second to be discovered using telescopes built from off-the-shelf components similar to those used by amateur stargazers.
[snip]
TrES-2 was detected using the three automated telescopes that make up the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES). These include the Sleuth telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory, the Lowell Observatory's Planet Search Survey Telescope (PSST) and the Stellar Astrophysics and Research on Exoplanets (STARE) telescope in the Canary Islands.

All were small 4-inch (10-centimeter) telescopes built using a combination of off-the-shelf parts and custom-made lenses. "It's all really quite small scale, you might call it desktop-type hardware," Dunham told SPACE.com. "It's not the industrial-strength stuff like these big telescopes that you see."

Is it time for you guys with telescopes here to get busy and discover some extrasolar planets for yourselves? This discovery could bring on extra interest and efforts by amateurs if it's really true. I noticed that the article gives no specifics of just What off-the-shelf parts they used. And, those "custom-made" lenses aren't explained either.

So what about it - Could amateurs realistically duplicate this effort/result? Just what would it take, and,... what might be those custom lenses?

[stuart]

I don't know the specifics, but yes, amateurs can totally do this. I was told that one of the first exoplanets was found with simply a 4" telescope. Not sure if I believe that ... but I also know that one of the first exoplanets was "confirmed" by using the on-campus 24" telescope here at CU Boulder.

[dmill1220]

I also read about this somewhere, and I believe it to be possible. this would only confirm that more people should join the AAVSO, don't they have a similar program going on right now? I may be mistaken!
I'm just starting to learn how to do Astrometry and Super Nova hunting with the equipment thats available to me or owned by me, I have visited the AAVSO web site but I'm Lacking the Johnson filter they require for CCD submissions, so for now I'm practicing with my Software before I try any submissions. I would think that you would need a very spread out amount of people to Monitor the same stars over a long period of time, not to mention a lot of good scientific data reduction that at least for myself, I'm totally incapable of
Dennis