Field of View
Kepler has a fixed field of view (FOV) against the sky. The diagram to the right shows the celestial coordinates and where the detector fields are located, along with the locations of a few bright stars with celestial north at the top left corner. The mission website has a calculator that will determine if a given object falls in the FOV, and if so, where it will appear in the photo detector output data stream. Data on extrasolar planet candidates is submitted to the Kepler Follow-up Program, or KFOP, to conduct follow-up observations.
- Kepler’s field of view covers 115 square degrees, around 0.28 percent of the sky, or “about two scoops of the Big Dipper.” It means that it would take around 400 Kepler like telescopes to cover whole sky.
Read more about this topic: Kepler (spacecraft)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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