of our planet! When scientists can explain those little squiggles, then we are once again on the right track. @135 shunt: I guess we need to forget about those hundreds of exoplanets found by the Kepler mission, as all they are is little squiggles on a graph, and a noisy one at that. /"Tide goes in, tide goes out... you can't explain that!" Also, for someone who claims to be an old hand at data analysis, you sure seem puzzled by things like seasons (one of the bigger causes of regular "squiggles" in the record.) Of course, if allllll the deviations WERE normalized and all the noise was directly accounted for, you'd probably then say that the result is over-processed and therefore useless. Be honest -- do you simply enjoy arguing? I mean, I do, at times. Nothing wrong with that, if you know what your goal is. But for FSM's sake, why not go to PunditKitchen? (For anyone who thinks I'm overreacting, you may not be aware of shunt's extensive post history. Not his/her/its first rodeo.) Joseph, those little squiggles are exactly what I was talking about. What you just stated was my scientific point and you expressed it better than I could have. The purpose of the Kepler space telescope was to monitor stars and look for very minor variations in their light outputs. If you averaged everything for 30 years in an effort to match a computer model, then you would miss the most important information contained