Stu...I guess we all know it isn't about that...
Now about those car keys...where were they occulted?...under his hat?
Articles by Jon Jenkins and Natalie Batalha at BtC when the clock marks 2.02PM EDT.

EDITED: Here they are:

HAT-p-7b confirmation and many great things to come - With Natalie Batalha

HAT-p-7b and the Grail quest - With Jon Jenkins

Dr Alan Boss showed an interesting graph of the already 352 exo-planet detected with graph-axes; Earth masses versus Orbital distance...
Is this graph available online?

Here Phil: http://kepler.nasa.gov/media/earlyresults/...lanetDistro.jpg
All of the images are at the mission's website:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/press/earlyresults.html

Interesting that HAT-P-7 is so much hotter on one side but that the other two are not. I wish they'd posted the data for all three, just so we could compare and contrast. Perhaps that'll all be in tomorrow's article in Science.

--Greg

Press meeting summary:
1. Kepler Space Telescope's detector works fine and it's capable of detecting Earth-sized exo-planets.
2. Optical wavelength detection of the phase curve of the planet HAT P-7b... accuracy is everything

I found myself mildly excited by this press conference. Exciting to know that they've already achieved this precision.
Thanks for all the links.

From Natalie Batalha's comments in BtC.. thanks Ustrax..

"Many of the light curves looked like they were drawn with a fine-point marker. I sent a sample light curve to a colleague and he replied asking me to please send the raw data as opposed to the “smoothed” data that hides the noise. It was a pleasure to tell him that this WAS the raw data."

That is exactly what struck me during the press conference... how clean that light curve looks... a beautiful line..

Much to look forward to...

Craig

... I think sums that up. Excellent news.

Andy

I took a couple screen caps during the press conference.





Was anyone else highly disappointed by the Q&A? All their questions were either useless or answerable by Wikipedia. I was hoping Planetary Society might dial in with some intelligent questions.

- Put this into perspective for an average joe.
- How far away is HAT-P-7b?
- How hot is HAT-P-7b?
- How far away is Kepler?

Nobody asked how many Earth candidates they may have found!? And even the principal investigator hinted at something about it! He said about Earth-size planets: "We need three data points, and for all we know we may already have one of them."

You were? Than I must assume that you don't know what Kepler is about and that you don't value the science taking place.
Since the beggining the team points to 2012 as the timeline for results regarding an Earth-like planet.
Are you disappointed by the fact they have decided to come up front and tell us what is going on until then?
I am disappointed with you for not rejoicing with the fact that Kepler ACTUALLY works. That is what I've got from this conference, the thing is really able to detect an Earth-size planet. And...who knows? It might have found one already...Guess one have to be patient and not disappointed.

Ustrax, I think you are confusing disappointment with the questions following the briefing for disappointment with the briefing itself. One can be excited about the briefing and then disappointed in the questions following it. In fact, the more exciting the news, the more disappointing the lack of good questions will be.

(I didn't see the briefing myself.)

As was noted in the reply above, you're confused by my definition of Q&A.

I was disappointed by the questions asked during the Q&A session at the end of the press conference. It seemed like the people asking the questions didn't bother to learn anything about Kepler before the briefing.

"How far away is Kepler?" You have got to be kidding me.

Sorry for the misunderstanding Syrinx...and thank you centsworth_II...I was taking it too serious...I have to deal with this another way...hey! I can always anagram it!

Gah! I missed the press conference because I was in the middle of negotiating a fair valuation for my house regarding property taxes!

Anyway, most of it is now on YouTube, if you missed it too -- here's the link to part 1, with two more parts posted by the same user.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWvpQ5Jwyfg

The space-multimedia archive site will probably have the full video at some point in the next day or two.

Anyway, this is fantastic news! I guess after Hubble's trials, there's always that period of worry and second guessing before you get the first block of science data and the instrument finally checks out okay.

Kepler's HAT-P-7 lightcurve is the subject of a paper in Science this week http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/325/5941/709