* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: HATNet

Blobrana · L

Gàspàr Bakos started his planet search with a $350 Nikon telephoto lens from a used-camera store in Manhattan.
His current arrays - including four HAT telescopes at Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona - are a bit pricier. Once you add the fancy digital technology and mounting hardware, each telescope costs about $50,000.
The design, developed by Bakos and three amateur astronomers in Hungary, still employs a relatively modest telephoto lens, hooked up to a CCD camera and set on a movable, robotically controlled mount.
They scan the night sky in a wide field, searching for the periodic dimming of stars, signs that a planet is passing.
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Blobrana · L

HATNet is a network of six small (11cm diameter), wide-field (8x8deg), fully-automated "HAT" telescopes. The scientific goal of the project is to detect and characterize extrasolar planets (exoplanets; those outside the Solar System), and also to find and follow bright variable stars. The network is maintained by the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. There are two main stations: the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and the Submillimeter Array (SMA) site of SAO atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.