Gasp! Exoplanellites!

Several times upon looking at the moon, I've always been inclined say that it is a planet in its own right. In fact I did say it on twitter. And by a slip of the twit-thumb, I've also mistakenly referred to exomoons as planets.
The allure of considering moons as planets is inescapable. Many scientists even describe Titan as "similar" to Earth! Another moon called Io was even singled out to describe an exoplanet by introducing a new type of planet called "Super-Io"!
Perhaps the inherent planet-like qualities of moons is the reason why the principal investigator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto couldn't hold the idea any longer.
Thus, Alan Stern proposes that we call large moons as "Satellite Planets". Yes, you heard that right: Satellite Planets!
And here's what I have to say to this idea: I like it!
A "planet" that is orbiting another planet may seem counter-intuitive at first but somehow it simplifies things once it sinks in. A "satellite" after all, is defined as a celestial body that revolves around a larger celestial body.
Now because we have this debate about what a planet is, we must forget for a moment the whole confusion about Pluto, and look at these round moons as Worlds in their own right, then perhaps one might see them as planets as well.
When the time is right, try looking at the moon in the blue morning sky. That gray crescent looks like a planet, right? Umm...well maybe its just me. Perhaps because I love planets. But now because Alan Stern is a big defender of Pluto, this idea will definitely elicit violent reactions from plutagonists. On the other hand, if he didn't love Pluto that much, he might not have been bold enough to put forward this idea. So let's see what comes of it.
In the meantime, I wouldn't mind introducing the term "Planellites" for twitter brevity.
Gasp! What have I done?! That means that we will have "exoplanellites" as another word for exomoons!


Links:
Should Large Moons be called...
Super-Earth may be a Super-Io
Grouping the Planets
Image taken from this page 

SETI and Kepler-4b

For some curious post to warm up a chilly monday, I just came across a surprising analysis of Kepler-4b signals not from planet-hunters, but from someone tinkering with SETI! There seems to be a "non-random" pattern that shows up in the graph. Could it be a clue to some alien message encoded within the signal?
Not too fast.
Apparently, someone who "likes analyzing signals" posted his baudline analysis of the Kepler-4 exoplanet data file from SETIquest. I'm just starting to dip my foot into Digital Signal Processing (DSP) here, but because I am interested in Data Visualization, I was drawn into it, which led me to write this quick post with lots of linktrails.
For the big question: Is there an alien message in the signal? No. There are still too many parameters to settle in order to say that it is an extraterrestrial code. But I wish to get back more into this as I am interested in finding patterns. The "spinal" pattern in the photo above seems like a good start for learning about Fast Fourier Transforms!
I downloaded the 2 Gig .dat file from SETIquest and tried to open it just to peek, but my computer almost crashed due to the humongous filesize. I wish they'd break it down into smaller bits. I'm sure SETIquest will improve in the coming days.
Many questions pop up as a result of this baudline analysis post, such as the directional source of the signal. According to the forum at SETIquest, its really from the Kepler-4 star system (but I still need a valid RA/Dec info, which was not provided in the .dat file description). Other issues need a little more work to confirm, such as whether it might have been our own artificial signals, which may include transmissions from our satellites and perhaps even signals from the Kepler telescope itself(!) Also, I think it would be great if the Allen Telescope Array will listen in on the list of star systems with known exoplanets.
There's some interesting bits of information regarding signal analysis, and bits about Kepler telescope, and some exoplanet related data files posted in the forum so check it out.
Kepler-4b is among the first batch of exoplanet discoveries announced by Kepler early this year. The host star Kepler-4 is also one of my adopted stars (ahem!) from the Pale Blue Dot project, so i took some time to look into this.
And as I mentioned in my past post about SETIquest with a quick review of His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem (that book was lent to me by @leebillings, by the way) the data is open for public consumption. So we can consider this post as a preview of things to come between the intersections of Planetary Science, Astronomy, SETI, Exoarchaeology(?), Citizen Science, and just plain ol' geekiness.


Links:

http://baudline.blogspot.com/2010/04/setiquest-kepler-exo4-1420-mhz.html
http://setiquest.org/forum/topic/baudline-analysis-kepler-exoplanet-4

http://www.baudline.com/what_is_baudline.html

http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/kepler4b/

http://setiquest.org/forum/topic/new-data-set-posted-exoplanet-060

http://exoplanetology.blogspot.com/2010/01/basic-guide-to-star-adoption.html

http://whitedwarf.org/palebluedot/planets.html

On Stephen Hawking's Xenophobia

By now, everybody's probly tired of all this Hawking's xenophobia reverberating across the web and twittercosm. What Hawking said must've been brilliant. Its got the elements of good news and bad news and everything in between. Kinda like good cop, bad cop. He's both right and wrong and fuzzy so it got the buzz. I am glad he's getting in on the topic, except he got everybody thinking and chattering about xenocidal stuff.
Just for fun, let me join the blabbing fray.
I'll start with Hawking's fear that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on. You see, there's so many planets out there. Billions of exoplanets, dammit! And earth's resources are almost sucked up by humans already. So implying that Aliens will kill us all to get the resources of our planet (or solar system) is a major fail.
But then again, the reasons that Aliens will kill us all depends on a lot of reasons. Or perhaps they won't kill us in the "kill" sense of the word. The prospect of merging or being usurped by an alien culture is a long and fuzzy romance.
But a major aspect, I think, is that it all depends on the timing. It has a bearing on how advanced the alien race is, and how advanced--or retarded we are--at the time of contact. For example, thousands of years from now, if by some lucky fluke, we somehow reach Kardashev Type 2 and the aliens are Type 3, they might consider us a threat to them, and vice-versa. War would ensue. But if the technological level is too far apart, as in our state right now (Type 0) versus their Type 3, then they might just leave us alone. If they suddenly arrive right now, I think our civilization would make a curious subject for highly-advanced galactic scholars and scientists. Or depending on their personalities, values and morals, they might just bet for fun and game about whether we'll destroy ourselves on our own.
It also depends on how cute we are. You see, it may also depend upon planetary affinity. If these advanced aliens evolved from an Earth-like world, then they might just find some kind of common ground with us. Perhaps deep within their "telluric" roots (as previous dwellers of a rocky planet), they might find us cute. That is, if the history of their planetary origin is still in their characteristics (or culture) even if they already evolved a space-faring biology. But if they evolved from an entirely different type of planet (for example a slushy dense planet) then they might find us revolting. The kind of response it would elicit from them might be similar to the disparity between one's reactions upon touching a cockroach or a puppy--splat or pat.
The parameters are so many, that we might as well create a Drake-like equation for xenosociological encounters. The aliens might destroy us, or they might not. Anything could happen. Or not happen. We do not know.
Perhaps the final verdict will depend on the quality of our existence and the footprints we leave in the Cosmos. There's plenty of reasons for us to remain quiet, as Hawking suggests. But its already too late. We've already sent signals and blown our cover. For example, our decades-old broadcasts are already speeding outwards to other stars (see the chart below). And our fate may entirely depend upon which of our TV programs they happen to see. Folks from Aldebaran might immediately obliterate us upon seeing our footages of World War II. While Mu Araens might simply enjoy our twilight zone episodes and leave us alone for a little while.

Mirror Planets

The universe--and the science we use to probe it, never ceases to amaze me. News just came out that gives more weight to the existence of "Mirror Matter" that possibly fills the universe. We all know that Dark Matter is that elusive missing matter that exerts certain influences on galaxies and cluster of galaxies. They exhibit tell-tale signs of their existence, but they are unseen.
In the race among physicists to produce direct evidence of Dark Matter, an Italian group announced that they have found signs of Dark Matter from their experiment called DAMA/LIBRA. Then, a US-based experiment called CoGent also found evidence of Dark Matter.
In an effort to reconcile the findings from the two experiments, Liam Fitzpatrick at Boston University suggested that a light, weakly interacting dark matter particle could explain both results. And now, Robert Foot from the University of Melbourne says that the existence of Mirror Matter could explain it better.
In a nutshell, Dark matter, which contains the "missing mass" that's needed to explain why galaxies stay together, could take any number of forms--and Mirror Matter could be one of them.
Most of these ideas are somewhat hypothetical as of yet. At this point I need to clarify that mirror matter is not anti-matter. Whereas anti-matter has more to do with particles of the opposite charge (i.e an electron with a positive charge, called a positron), mirror matter owes it's distinction to parity or chirality. To understand it better, let's use the analogy of left-handed molecules where chirality arises from geometry not composition.
Another difference between mirror matter and antimatter is that anti-matter plus ordinary matter is highly reactive and explosive--both will be annihilated in a burst of energy upon contact. But mirror matter and normal matter reacts so weakly, where the effect of gravity could be the only noticeable "symmetrical" interaction between the two.
Now that you have an idea of mirror matter, here's the mind-blowing aspect of it. The implications of the existence of mirror matter is astounding because when you consider the fact that in the observable universe alone, we already say that there are billions and billions of stars. How much more if there are additional mirror galaxies, mirror stars, and mirror planets? The observable universe that we infer, based on what we have "seen" thus far with our telescopes (like Hubble, Spitzer, etc.), only accounts for 4.6% of the whole universe. Dark matter accounts for 23%! (the rest is dark energy which is even harder to detect).
Even if only a certain percentage of Dark Matter is mirror matter, and if that is proven true--then it will be quite staggering to our imagination.
Think about mirror exoplanets. Think about the kind of life that might arise from planets made of Dark Matter. Think about lifeforms and advanced beings made up of mirror matter. What will happen if you shake hands with a "mirror alien"?
Truly, there is so much we don't know. Our imagination pales in comparison to the unknowns of the universe. And the journey of knowing, and speculating a bit, at each step--is simply a wonderful experience.


Links:
Mirror Matter
First evidence that Mirror Matter from Technology Review
Signs of Dark Matter... from Physorg

Image Credit:
The World is your Mirror from www.seanmantey.co.uk

Giantess: A Possibilian Tale

I came across the Possibilian from a tweet. The Neuroscientist, David Eagleman coined the term to describe someone who is actively open to different ideas. In a nutshell,

"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."

The idea of "Possibilianism" appealed to me because it aligns quite well with my twitter manifesto regarding my stance about God (check the last portion of my twanifesto). So I dug deeper into this worldview, finding clues as to how this neuroscientist arrived at a similar view that I hold.
Apparently, David introduced this term during an interview about his book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. I am now reading this book because I was curious as to the kind of work that a Possibilian would share to the world.
And so I found Sum quite enjoyable, being a collection of short metaphysical stories, it suited my reading style of digesting bite-sized portions, reading one story at a time.
And so I came across a story that gave me a reason to write about it on this blog. The story is called Giantess.
In a nutshell, the story illustrates emergence on a grand scale. An enormity that is expressed only via a metaphor using cellular biology wherein planets, ah yes, exoplanets are merely proteins within a cell we call "The Milky Way", which is one among billions of galaxies within an immeasurable living mass called the Giantess.
On this grand cosmic scale, our tiny solar system dont matter much to the uber-emergent entity, like how we casually wipe away a tiny drop of blood from a pinprick. Life on planets can be wiped away by a rain of asteroids, and entire galaxies would be devoured by blackholes, and the Giantess couldn't care less.
Here's some tidbits from the story to give you a feel of Eagleman's style of writing,

"To be clear," he says to you, "I am not your God. Instead, you and I are galactic neighbors; I am from a planet associated with the star you call Terzan Four..."

"For a long time, we have been studying our neighbors: You Earthlings and thirty seven other planets besides. We have developed highly accurate systems of equations to predict the future growth and social directions of your planets."

The common theme of the book revolves around hypothetical afterlife scenarios and the different playful manifestations of God. But collectively, the stories in Sum covers a wide range of topics that any enthusiast or scholar in many fields (Philosophy, Spirituality, Psychology, Theology, Computer Science, Physics and Metaphysics, Cosmology, etc) will find a 'connecting point' or their own metaphor, and a reason to write about it in their blogs, the same way I did for exoplanetology.
As I keep a close watch over the ongoing march of the Plurality of Worlds, the ever-growing discovery of exoplanets opens up a lot of possibilities, and synthesizes different fields--that the best way to tread is to simply maintain fresh eyes on fascinating wonders of new discoveries, and to keep an open mind to the challenges it would bring to long-held worldviews and beliefs.
Is there life out there? Are there intelligent, conscious beings on other worlds? How does their existence affect humanity's concept of God? How will it affect my Faith?
In light of those kinds of questions, the kind of attitude suggested by Eagleman's book is summed up by it's simple meta-message: We don't know...

Links:
Possibilian
David Eagleman 40 Afterlives
Exoplanetology Twitter Manifesto

Photo Credit:
The Final April Fools, Light & Illusion – Art by Randall Klopping

Science Fiction and The Exponential Discovery of Exoplanets

How does the exponential discovery of exoplanets impact the landscape of Science Fiction? Surely we are at a stage in history were new doors are being opened up by the accelerating rate of exoplanet discoveries. I wonder how it affects the human psyche. How does the growing knowledge of new worlds impact the human imagination?
Will a new breed of science fiction writers and film-makers create richer planetary settings with more elaborate world-building efforts?
Curiously, I decided to do some research and experiment on it. I started to compile a list of fictional planetary settings (check out the list at freebase). This is an ongoing experiment and anyone can participate by adding their own favorite fictional planet within freebase. If you notice that the planet setting in your favorite sci-fi novel is not listed, then by all means please add it in by signing up into freebase and contributing your knowledge.
Looking at the numbers so far, we currently have 443 known exoplanets compared to 200 fictional planets. Perhaps I am concluding prematurely, but it struck me how our human imagination is lagging behind scientific findings in terms of coming up with new worlds. As you can see from the chart, the rate of discovery of new planets is soaring at an exponential rate. What about new planets in science fiction? In literature?

I wonder whether there will come a time when some kind of growth spurt will occur in the number of new fictional worlds in sci-fi. And whether the ever-expanding knowledge about exoplanets will have something to do with it.
The 443 discovered exoplanets span from 1992, while the list of fictional planets span all the way back further than that. So we may not know yet whether the same exponential curve will happen to the number of new planetary settings being created in science fiction.
And this being an ongoing research, there are still some gray areas in this experiment that we need to iron out in due time. For example, some computer games actually have storylines that are set on fictional planets. Some of these in-game planets turn out to have adaptations onto comic books like Halo, Mass Effect and Gears of War. Some other games have massive numbers of planets, such as the case with Eve-Online which have thousands of planets--yet only a few are mentioned in the EVE novels. So it's definitely an open issue how a planet within a game jumps into the scifi landscape.
I do not know how this experiment will turn out, but one thing i'm sure is that it is fun to be there as it unfolds.

"We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising."
~Carl Sagan

Hubble

And it had to come to this, that on April 1st, I had to call in sick due to severe grogginess caused by lack of sleep. After I snoozed my way to recovery, I then had to make a quick escape from the oncoming harrows of the waking life. I headed for the Liberty Science Center to see Hubble in the IMAX dome.

For my case, this short film turned out to be ok for a hurried schedule. For a mere 40 minutes, a lot of substance were crammed into it. It was short but sweet. But of course I would've enjoyed more if it had more of the spacey scenes.

The film tells a mini-story of how the brave astronaut heroes fixed Hubble on the last servicing mission. And it showed spectacular scenes of deep space, with all the galaxies and stars, gliding towards the Orion Nebula, and grazing at "tadpoles" in stellar nurseries, then zooming onto star formations.

The wonders that the Hubble telescope shares to us is already mesmerizing by way of its pictures of stars, nebulae, galaxies and so forth. Yet several times in the film, the narrator (Leonardo DeCaprio) mentioned the search for other worlds. And one of the Astronauts even mentioned how Hubble can study the atmosphere of other planets. Of course, that made my eyes grow wider than the gargantuan dome.

As the film reached its climax and ended with the view of earth, I knew that my little escape from the busy day was over. Yet I realized that even as mankind will always try to escape the planet's pull of gravity, a spacefarer will always look back. And when one scans the starry heavens in search for other earth-like planets, there's no escaping--it always points us back to our own home.

Exoplanetary Inspiration Through An Artist's Eye

Just a few moments ago, my wife showed me a book she picked from last saturday's trip at a huge Flea Market somewhere in the Meadowlands of New Jersey. The book which was printed in 1988 is entitled Devis Grebu, Through an Artist' Eye. It was a showcase of the Romanian-born painter, cartoonist and graphic artist Devis Grebu whose work was mostly on watercolor and color pencil. I thumbed through the pages, provoked to see some more of his whimsical and seemingly paradoxical illustrations at each turn of the page.

Then suddenly, many of his "otherworldly" paintings began to catch my attention. I realized that they actually have some context in relation to this exoplanetology blog I maintain! And so before I knew it, I was hurriedly writing up this post amidst all the chores I still had to do.

Way back in 1988, the folks probably had no idea that we would have more than 430 exoplanets by 2010. But it seemed that Devis Grebu had a hunch that the human race would be learning about other worlds. With that thought, I simply just had to write this up.

Around 10 of his works featured in the book had planetary connotations (happily mixed among provocative ones), and are quite inspirational to say the least. I show only a couple here that I found quite the most meaningful among the set that I deemed to be "exoplanetary". What really prompted me to write this post was the last page which showed the "green" and titled "The End of The Journey". The contemplative context written about the painting turned out to be quite inspiring to me, even though I don't play golf!

"Two legs firmly planted on the green. The club ready to tap the ball into the hole. But what hole? What ball? What green? Where is the game being played? And who is playing? A god, tired of his creation and opting for a final solution? Or some searcher looking for a new field of thought, an opening for a new start? In this big game called Anywhere Out of This World, each player must find his own way to end the match."

Brainwave 2010: Is Life Out There?

It was a beautiful day, and perhaps many were more interested in getting some sun as there were less people this time than the previous brainwave event I attended. This time it was rock musician Claire Evans of Yacht and Fred Adams author of The Five Ages of The Universe.
When the Director of the Event, Tim McHenry introduced the duo, i just learned that Claire Evans actually has a blog called Universe, and Tim started the event by showing the 60-sec animation created by Claire about the evolution of life. Then she began the conversation by introducing the Fermi Paradox.
The speculations that followed included the notion that Life is common, but intelligence is rare.
Claire is cognizant of the fact that we dont know enough just yet about the makeup of extra-terrestrial lifeforms, speculating--for example, about a "sentient cloud" and then wondering how to best detect them. However Fred says that we don't know anything better than using radio astronomy for SETI just yet, and so that is the method we currently use.
Claire likes the Hypothesis that some Advanced Technological Civilizations (ATC) know that we exist, but they dont want to touch us--in line with the "Prime Directive" in Star Trek, ATCs must not bother with developing civilizations.
As the duo continued to explore the solutions to the Fermi Paradox, they moved on to bleaker scenarios such as the inclination of Technological societies to destroy itself. Or various naturally occuring cosmic events such as Supernovae could explain why no civilization ever lives long enough to meet everyone else.
Fred mentions the idea that we're literally living in a supernova bubble--that supernovae have been a few parsecs away around our sun's neighborhood in the distant past.
Somehow this alerted Claire to mention speculations of how earth might die, such as getting yanked out of orbit by a passing celestial object. She says she might find the scene beautiful, how the atmosphere would snow down on earth, as the planet freezes the surface dwellers to death. She added that among the survivors would be the creatures around the deep underwater vents.
Fred adds how a watery planet would be in the cold outer part of a solar system. It will have a frozen outer shell, but internal heat would cause liquid water beneath.
And since Fred mentioned that the "Holy Grail" of SETI is the discovery of a technologically advanced civilization, Claire asks what would it mean if extra-terrestrial life were found.
Fred answers that its a gamechanger...but creationism wouldn't go away. Fred mentions though, a "lesser" Holy Grail, in the form of developing the ability to create synthetic life in the lab. Claire asks Fred "Do you believe in Technological Singularity?" since she herself finds it hard to believe. Fred answers by saying that ours is a young civilization and we might engineer our survival. Fred mentions the idea of moving the earth by a bit outwards (i think he meant gravity traction) via an asteroid. The gradual outward migration of Earth's orbit will hopefully match the swelling of the sun and move outwards to the expanding habitable zone to prolong life on this planet. Finally, among other feats of hypothetical Astroengineering, the Dyson sphere was mentioned, of course.
As the Q&A portion ensued, I happened to be picked to ask the third question. After a gentleman asked about Kepler and it's discoveries, Fred was optimistic that the Earth-like discovery will come very soon (if not this year). I followed up by asking what the impact of the discovery of an Earth-like planet will be to the human culture.
Fred answers that the impact of the discovery of an earth analog on human culture will be modest. Though, it will be on the front page of the New York Times, he adds. Claire says it takes much more than an earth-like planet to rouse the masses as people generally doesn't care much about these things. It will be the discovery of Life on these worlds that will have much impact on humanity.
Tim asks what scifi film exemplifies SETI best. Claire mentions "Contact". Fred, still in the technological frame of mind from answering a previous singularity question, says he likes "Bladerunner". Science fiction was briefly discussed among the audience, mentioning how scifi mirrors our hopes and anxieties in terms of a technological future.
Tim wraps up with a question on the future of our universe. Fred shows a few slides of new findings about our cosmic future, how the accelerating expansion of the cosmos will isolate galaxies, and result in "island universes", rendering all hopes of communicating with other galaxies impossible as light will never reach from one to the other.
The point of contact seems bleak in terms of gigayears ahead. And even now, the prospect of finding any extra-terrestrial signal may seem to be a hopeless endeavor if you take the negative stance.
The key I suppose, is to keep asking, and to keep searching. Perhaps there really is something incredible out there just waiting to be known.

Exogazing 55 Cancri

Springtime is around the corner and the familiar constellations hover over above us with a nice chill. This time I've chosen a faint star called 55 Cancri to exogaze upon.

To find 55 Cancri, start by locating Castor and Pollux. An imaginary line drawn from Castor to Pollux will point you to the middle part of Cancer. But extending that line from Pollux past Mars will lead you to M44, or the Beehive cluster of stars. Move up by little over 10 degrees up from that cluster and you'll see 55 Cancri.

At magnitude 5.95, binoculars would help a lot to spot 55 Cnc. What I recently learned is that Castor and Pollux is 4.5 degrees apart. I know this because they fit within my binocular's field of view (FOV) which is 4.5 degrees in diameter. Knowing this calibration has been a great help in star hopping with binoculars.

The illustrations show how it would look like if you use a binocular with 4.5 degrees FOV. If you don't use binoculars, just remember that your fist held at arm's length spans approximately 10 degrees in the sky.

There are many reasons that make 55 Cancri an interesting target for exogazing. It's an extrasolar system with the most planets to date--five known exoplanets orbiting around it. And its a binary star system 41 light-years away consisting of a yellow dwarf star and a smaller red dwarf star separated by over 1,000 AUs. Yes, it would seem unlikely that any planets would form around binary systems and yet here is 55 Cnc screaming with 5 exoplanets confirmed to be orbiting the primary star, 55 Cancri A (the yellow dwarf)!

When you finally spot the 55 Cancri system, revel in the fact that a pinpoint of light can denote entire worlds. Isn't it amazing? You see a starlight, and you can focus a thought to that point of light and the planets it foretells. That is the essence of Exogazing!

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken"
~ John Keats

Links:

55 Cancri from Deep Fly

Amateur Planet-Hunting via Web-based Observatories (WBO)

Because I live in a light-polluted area, the idea of renting remote telescopes to study or hunt exoplanets has been in my mind for almost 2 years. During that time, it was too expensive and the capabilities of those rental telescopes were not yet sufficient to hunt for exoplanets. But lately, the idea of renting telescopes for planet-hunting is slowly but surely moving closer to reality. The advancement of Web-Based Observatories (WBO) is an exciting event in the history of Astronomy, moreso for our case--in amateur planet-hunting.

There are many WBO's out there, but on this post I mention the exciting features of Global Rent-a-Scope (GRAS) which seems to me as the most appealing for amateur exoplanet hunters so far.

GRAS gives the option to write your own script and run it at a specific time in the future. This is perfect for training planet-hunters by generating their own light curves of known transiting exoplanets. Another great feature of GRAS that is potential for hunting exoplanets is their capability to do photometry via a software called Photometrica. Remember, the Kepler telescope uses the Photometry method!

And for the more advanced users, GRAS offers direct control on the CCD camera plus a host of other software and application such as MaximDL, The Sky, and FocusMax that let you directly control the telescope.

What's next? Perhaps adaptive optics might get incorporated into these amateur WBO's someday. And as CCD technology advances further, plus new technologies in astronomical instrumentations (like Astrophotonics) gets implemented onto larger but hopefully more affordable telescopes, then perhaps a hopeful exoplanet discovery via WBO is near the horizons!

Links:
Web-based Observatories (PDF Direct Link)
Global-Rent-a-Scope (GRAS)

SETI's Quest and His Master's Voice

A few weeks ago, by coincidence, some news came while I've been reading "His Master's Voice" by Stanislaw Lem. It turned out that the SETI Institute will open up its data to "Citizen Scientists" via SETIQuest. The data collected by the SETI Institute will be opened to the public for anyone to analyze.

It all made me curious about our reactions if a message from the stars were discovered hidden within the SETI archives. I cant help but think that some of the things that occured in Lem's novel might actually happen. The government might assemble a team of scientists to specifically study this message from the stars. Various experts such as Mathematicians, Astronomers, Astrophysicists, Astrobiologists might be gathered and isolated in a remote location to decipher the message. And of course, the military and other covert agencies will secretly be studying the data with a different purpose in mind. Now Stanislaw Lem writes in a way that makes it all seem like His Master's Voice (HMV) was a real story. It was so much fun to read, that it often made me chuckle.

During Stanislaw Lem's time, he saw a kind of Science that is marked by covert operations, and secret projects perpetrated by a government more concerned with warfare. But now we live in a wonderful time in history where the common folk can get involved in pure Scientific pursuit. The technological advances, and the opening up of massive data now allow anyone to donate their time, skills, and resources for noble purposes. This is the era of Citizen Science and it comes at a perfect time to support the aim of the SETI project as well.

Check out SETIQuest for ongoing developments in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and make sure you join the effort. We might find another "voice" from way out there! And if it doesn't happen in our time, just remember that it is worth the effort to keep searching, exploring and learning. It's all part of the journey and adventure to find our place in this Cosmos.