[NormsRevenge]

Image taken by the Kepler telescope, released by NASA in April 2009, showing a small portion of Kepler's full field of view -- an expansive, 100-square-degree patch of sky in our Milky Way galaxy. Five months after it was launched on a mission to find earth-like planets, the Kepler space telescope has sent back to Earth high-precision images of a planet some 1,000 light years away, NASA said. (AFP/NASA/File)

[NormsRevenge]

NASA Kepler
http://kepler.nasa.gov/

[housemouse 1]

bookmark

[edpc]

a planet with the unromantic name of HAT-P-7-B

If the images are truly "stuning" they should rename the planet Beber.

[Buck W.]

OK—which one is it?

[canuck_conservative]

“stunning” ??

Looks like a bunch of friggin’ dots to me

[normanpubbie]

Wow, that Kepler telescope is pretty snazzy. But a chart buried deeply in the NASA Kepler site is really informative. Skip the yellow dots (which apparently stand for discovered planets outside our solar system) and concentrate on the named planets. Notice that the Earth is the only one in the green (habitable) zone. Here's the chart:



Note: The abbreviation AU stands for Astronomical Units. 1 AU is 93 million miles, the distance from the Earth to the Sun.