Backyard astronomer hits 100 exoplanets
Australian amateur astronomer Chris Stockdale, working from a backyard observatory in regional Victoria, has helped confirm 100 exoplanets and was awarded a national medal for the milestone. (abc.net.au).
An exoplanet is a planet around another star, and one of the main ways to find one is to watch a star dim by less than 1 percent when a planet crosses in front of it. Chris Stockdale, an amateur astronomer in Victoria, has now helped confirm more than 100 of them from a backyard observatory. (abc.net.au) The Astronomical Society of Australia awarded Stockdale the 2026 Berenice and Arthur Page Medal, which recognizes scientific contributions by amateur astronomers in Australia and its territories. The society said he was honored for co-discovering more than 100 exoplanets. (asa.astronomy.org.au) Stockdale works from Churchill in Victoria’s Gippsland region with a fully automated 320-millimetre telescope mounted on a precision tracking system. He uses it to lock onto one patch of sky for hours and measure tiny drops in starlight from stars hundreds of light years away. (abc.net.au) That method is called a transit search: space telescopes flag a possible planet, then ground-based observers check whether the dip came from the target star or from something else, such as an eclipsing binary star nearby. Stockdale told ABC the dip he looks for is typically about 0.5 percent to 1 percent. (abc.net.au) His work feeds into larger surveys led by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which launched on April 18, 2018 and is still operating in an extended mission. TESS monitors millions of stars for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. (science.nasa.gov; tess.mit.edu) The scale of that pipeline is the reason backyard follow-up still matters. NASA’s Exoplanet Archive said in March 2026 that the confirmed exoplanet count had reached 6,147, and the archive added more planets again in April. (exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu) The Astronomical Society of Australia said Stockdale has jointly authored more than 100 planet-discovery papers, including one in *Nature*. Its April 7 media release also said he co-discovered an “ultra-hot Neptune,” four “super Jupiters,” and several potentially Earth-like planets. (scienceinpublic.com.au) Stockdale has described himself as one part of a larger team, telling ABC that “many people” are involved in each discovery. The next step is the same as the last one: more nights in the dome, more light curves, and more checks on candidates from the sky surveys above him. (abc.net.au)
