Detecting exoplanets with amateur equipment

Hi,

After my/Fergal's talk on Kepler at COSMOS a couple of people asked me for more information on what I'd said about amateurs obtaining light curves of transiting planets.

The best place to start is with Bruce Gary's website and book brucegary.net/book_EOA/x.htm

The book can be downloaded as as 260page pdf and is quite detailed but very informative about how to go about obtaining such light curves.

Cheers,
~Al

An amateur in New Zealand recently imaged a proto planetary disk around a star with I believe was a 10" scope

johnomahony wrote: An amateur in New Zealand recently imaged a proto planetary disk around a star with I believe was a 10" scope

Any link to this?, i'd be interested in seeing it. Thanks.

paddyman wrote: Any link to this?, i'd be interested in seeing it. Thanks.

www.pbase.com/rolfolsen/image/139722640/original

Some of us on the IFAS forum took up the gauntlet and successfully monitored some of exoplanet transits about 5 years ago.
We got one interesting transit of planet 'b' orbiting GL 581 which indicated a 4 minute earlier than predicted transit.
We published the observation, indicating that there may be a planet 'c'. This was confirmed the next month in another publication by another group.
You never know when you get out and observe what unexpected results you can obtain.
We found Bruce Gary's book most useful to provide some excellent guidance in this pursuit.

Eamonn