Scripts & Downloads

Scripts & Downloads

Free educational scripts and tools from Hamo-Tech. Download, learn, and experiment!

🪐 Exoplanet Hunter

Detect a real planet using NASA’s Kepler telescope data — in Python!

This script walks you through the same technique NASA scientists used to discover thousands of exoplanets. You’ll download real star brightness data, plot a light curve, and calculate the size of a planet 2,800 light years away.

What you’ll learn

  • How planetary transits work (why star brightness dips when a planet passes in front)
  • How to download and work with real NASA space telescope data
  • Phase folding — stacking repeated signals to reduce noise
  • How to calculate a planet’s size from the depth of a brightness dip

What you’ll need

Install the required Python libraries before running:

pip install lightkurve matplotlib

What the script produces

  • 01_full_light_curve.png — the full brightness record of the star Kepler-17 over ~90 days, with visible transit dips
  • 02_folded_transit.png — all transits stacked together using phase folding, revealing the planet’s clear signal
  • A printed size estimate for Kepler-17b (the real answer is ~1.31 × Jupiter’s radius!)

Download

⬇️ Download exoplanet_hunter.py

See it in action

We run this script automatically every month against live NASA data. View the latest results →

More scripts coming soon. Have a suggestion? Get in touch.