http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-20090416.html

"Kepler's first glimpse of the sky is awe-inspiring," said Lia LaPiana, Kepler's program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "To be able to see millions of stars in a single snapshot is simply breathtaking."

One new image from Kepler shows its entire field of view -- a 100-square-degree portion of the sky, equivalent to two side-by-side dips of the Big Dipper. The regions contain an estimated 14 millions stars, more than 100,000 of which were selected as ideal candidates for planet hunting.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

Some links;
Kepler; http://kepler.nasa.gov/

They are some very exciting images. What makes these images exciting is not that they clearly show you cool pictures of the stars, they don't. Whats cool is that watching the same identical images day after day, and month after month, we will occasionally see individual pixels in the images "Dimming" as a planet passes by the star.

The images from Kepler are intentionally "blurred", just a little bit to block out the glare from much brighter stars that would destroy large parts of the image.

Its very cool,
John.
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Kepler's first Full focal plane image. 42 CCD's make up the full image. The grid lines across the picture show how the focal plane is laid out on Kepler's camera -- the largest ever launched in space at 95 megapixels.
Kepler, Apr 13 2009.

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We should expect to see the first results in only a couple months as Kepler locates the hot Jupiters and other planets close to their stars. That in itself is really neat and will tide me over for the next couple years while we find the more habitable planets.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

We should expect to see the first results in only a couple months as Kepler locates the hot Jupiters and other planets close to their stars. That in itself is really neat and will tide me over for the next couple years while we find the more habitable planets.

This is true Borgholio,

"TRES-2" is marked on the image i posted. They already know that TRES-2 has a planet in orbit around it. They found it before Kepler went up.

John.

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We should expect to see the first results in only a couple months as Kepler locates the hot Jupiters and other planets close to their stars. That in itself is really neat and will tide me over for the next couple years while we find the more habitable planets.

This is true Borgholio,

"TRES-2" is marked on the image i posted. They already know that TRES-2 has a planet in orbit around it. They found it before Kepler went up.

John.

I wonder if TRES-2 is orbiting one of the target stars. If it is, then it would be an excellent test to see if Kepler really works...since we already know there's a planet there. :)

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

Thanks for sharing guys, I never get tired looking up out there ::Big grin::

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Nobody is nobody. Everyone has something to offer

The Kepler exoplanet simulation

Pick up a star and find out whether there might be an exoplanet with suitable conditions for life---->Select a star to investigate

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Thanks for the pic. We can see that star density is higher in the lower right. It that part closer to the centre of the galaxy?

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Life is short so, make the best of it.