Kepler

This is a cracking image from NASA's APOD by Ben Cooper of the recent launch of the Kepler telescope. Kepler will be looking for changes in the brightness of more than a million stars every five hours, searching for "winks" in light that happen when a planet passes in front of its star.

Planet spotting outside the solar system is still in its infancy with only three hundred odd Jupiter sized gas giants on record. What Kepler will do is look for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone around stars where liquid water may exist.

Exciting times indeed.