interesting paper: Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope

[Stupendous Man <richmond@stupendous.cis.rit.edu>]

  I came across an interesting paper on astro-ph today.  You
can find it at

        http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0401220

It describes a plan to find transits by planets around other
stars via a very wide-field device: a camera lens (42 mm diameter,
f/1.9) with a 4Kx4K Kodak KAF-16801E chip behind it.  The 
field of view is about 26 degrees on a side.  Let's see ... that
means that each pixel must be about (26*60)/4196 = 0.37 arcminutes,
or about 23 arcseconds on a side.  About twice as big as the 
Mark III pixels, and three times the size of the Mark IV pixels.
They have done a small bit of observing from a site in Ohio,
and claim 1% - 4% relative photometric accuracy in the range
V = 6 - 10.  They want to go to Kitt Peak for darker skies.

  They estimate that they will find about 10 transits by planets
during their first year of operation.  

  Hmmmm.

                                Michael