A home-brew observatory detects exoplanet
David Schneider, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum, was interested in exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the sun, but figured this kind of exercise as a home-based project was going to need expensive telescopes; he stumbled across a project at Ohio State University, where resourceful astronomers had figured out a way to spot exoplanets using a device with a lens designed for high-end cameras. Schneider's wheels turned, thinking he might also be able to pull this off if he got his hands on a charge-coupled-device detector not research-grade, and maybe he could forget about an expensive telescope as well? He also discovered an online posting by an amateur astronomer saying he had detected a known exoplanet using a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera with a telephoto lens.