Plane Thunters

[EA2007]

Afternoon people,

Having perused the Zooniverse website many moons ago (excuse the astronomical pun) and becoming aware of the Plane Thunters attempts at finding exoplanets I was very keen to involve myself in the task of finding some other world...oooooohhhh!

After going through some 150+ light streams there have been about two possible transit stars that have passed my way, good news, they've been logged and smiled upon.

The not so good news is that from what is portrayed as being a new feature (as seen via the BBC's Stargazing Live program) to allow people to use the Kepler info, it seems that the stars we have been given have already been studied numerous times and recycled for definitive classification.

To explain, I found a kick-ass example of several transits (or an eclipsing binary if your into dull things) and subsequently logged it and sent it on its way to the Kepler boffins top secret hideout for analysis (similar to the batcave?). I also favourited the star as its looked pretty neat and I wanted to show family, friends, the pet cat and other unsuspecting victims (notably the girlfriend) of this rather magnificent array of white dots, reminiscent to some of Kylie's polker dot dress bikini, or a person drawing a line on black paper with salt and having a nervous twitch.

Upon looking at the favourited items it says something like 'view this star data' which I clicked on this brought up some monotone blue and white graphs which people can comment on....however from what is thought to be fresh data the comments on this particular star were from 2011 or 2010.

Grrrrrrrr, what's the point of looking at something someone else has already seen. That's like me looking at Jupiter for several months and deducing what Galileo did and claiming it as my own work...pah!

Thoughts ?

By the way, I respect the time that has gone into planethunters.org, its a stellar effort (again ignore the pun) to help the public engage with astronomy from their home or workplace. I look forward to more attempts at understanding more of the universe. Has anyone been successful in finding an exoplanet, be cool if you have.

[proflight2000]

Must admit, it intrigued me for about 5 mins, then it was like looking at paint drying, my eyes were killing me. I think I found about 400 new planets, i just cant be bothered to tell anyone :-)