David Charbonneau, (Sizing-Up Planets Around Sun-Like Stars) is a final-year doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University. His thesis research is focused on developing new techniques to detect planets orbiting nearby, Sun-like stars. He is currently at the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, working on a transit search for extrasolar planets, with the goal of detecting roughly a dozen new systems.

In the past five years, astronomers have uncovered a swarm of planets orbiting nearby, Sun-like stars. Until last fall, everything we knew about these distant worlds was inferred indirectly from their gravitational tug on their parent stars. However, in September 1999, David and his colleagues were able to measure the transit of one of these planets across the face of its star, and thus, for the first time, were able to infer the mass, radius, and density of a planet orbiting another Sun.

David will present the bestiary of known extrasolar planets, review the many ongoing searches, and explain what these hope to find. He will discuss his team's observations of the transiting planet system HD 209458, an object that will be visible during STARFEST 2000. The discovery data was obtained with a 4-inch telescope using many off-the-shelf components. While a challenging observation, a serious amateur with a photoelectric photometer or a CCD should be able to make a measurement.