Project Panoptes

PANOPTES (Panoptic Astronomical Networked Observatories for a Public Transiting Exoplanets Survey) is a citizen science project which aims to build low cost, robotic telescopes which can be used to detect transiting exoplanets. Due to the simplicity and low cost (an individual PANOPTES unit is targeted to cost about USD), a PANOPTES "unit" can be reproduced quickly and easily by students or amateur scientists. In this way, many units can be deployed at many different sites to provide continuous and redundant sky coverage. PANOPTES is designed from the ground up to be a citizen science project which will involve the public in all aspects of the science, from data acquisition to data reduction.