As Yoda said, "Size matters not." Three small, mostly amateur-class telescopes worked together to discover a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting its parent star 500 light-years away from Earth. These small-boy networks work hand-in-hand with the professional planet-hunting telescopes, including the upcoming NASA Kepler mission.

The newly-discovered planet, TrES-2, orbits its host star GSC 03549-02811 once every 2.5 days, and is located within the constellation Draco. TrES-2 is clasified as a "Hot Jupiter," a giant planetary body that orbits its star closer than Mercury orbits our Sun. Hot Jupiters have recently received attention for their potential role in forming Earth-like habitable planets.

TrES-2 is named after the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES), a network of telescopes belonging to Caltech's Palomar Observatory, Lowell Observatory in Arizona, and one located in the Canary Islands. These telescopes are generally small (around the 10cm range), and the imaging equipment are the ones you'd find in an astronomy hobby store, such as off-the-shelf 4-inch camera lenses. They were able to gather enough data to actually locate TrES-2 as a possible planet, but the team had to seek follow-up confirmation from a much larger telescope, the 10-meter monster at Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The TrES telescopes, along with the big boys and other telescope networks around the world, observe and record the sky for as many nights as possible, even for a couple of months. The telescopes locate big planets by watching for a drop in the brightness of the parent star as seen from Earth. This happens as the planet pasess betwen the star and Earth-bound observers. Computers then analyze the data. This is harder than it looks. The software cannot distinguish between binary systems (twin-star systems that also change in brightness as seen from Earth) and Hot Jupiters. So astronomers need to do painstaking manual work. One advantage of this method of hunting planets, though, is that they can also estimate the size and mass of a planet through the same observations.

TrES-2 is the thrid planet discovered by small-telescope networks, and the second discovered by TrES. Admits David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, "Hunting for planets with amateur equipment seemed crazy when we started the project, but with this discovery the approach has become mainstream."