"Soon I built myself a small telescope and it sort of took off from there, " Schmidt said.
So if you have a small telescope, even a pair of binoculars, you may be able to see the results from this unique event.
But it's a comet that you need binoculars or a small telescope to see now, for minutes or even for an hour or two after this collision.
Trappist (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) will study exoplanets by measuring at high precision the "brightness dips" that can be caused by objects transiting (passing in front of) their parent star.
Started in late 1998, the space-alien hunt has recruited the owners of 2.5 million PCs, tapping their machines' idle processing time to search small chunks of radio telescope data for patterns that might signal intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos.
The ambition of astronomical project Alma, the largest-ever international radio telescope venture, is no small feat.
The 1.8m (60-inch) diameter telescope on Haleakala will also spot many small, faint bodies in the outer Solar System that hid from previous surveys.
BBC: Pan-Starrs telescope begins operations to hunt asteroids
In visible light, all stars appear as points, only smeared out into a small circle by the atmosphere and by the optics of the telescope.
Scientists made the discovery first by pinpointing their target through infrared images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and later using the Very Large Telescope to deduce that the object was both too small to be a star as well as hot and young enough (752F and under 120 million years old) to fit the behavior of a planet orphaned early into its existence.
Once again, these worlds were identified using data from Nasa's Kepler telescope, which was put in orbit in 2009 with the specific goal of hunting down small planets.
Under pressure to shrink overhead and telescope the new-product cycle, big companies are more likely to turn to universities or small companies to help develop ideas.
NASA's Kepler telescope is permanently on the lookout for celestial objects of interest, and its latest discovery is a small one.
ENGADGET: NASA's Kepler telescope spies smallest planet to date, no aliens
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