Re: Backyard Search for Asteroids and Extrasolar Planets
Astronomy, even on a grand scale is not really that expensive a hobby. Look at the costs of car collector hobbyists or the annual cost of playing golf. 18" amateur scopes and larger equipped with top rank CCD's can be done at a one time cost of under $10,000. These light buckets can gat down to 20 mag and can detect either motion or 0.0x magnitude transit dips. Superjovian transit observations.
-philw (just an 8" Celestron)