From Gippsland to the cosmos: This Churchill local has discovered over 100 planets

Chris Stockdale was 10 years old when he watched the 1969 Apollo moon landing at his primary school. Ever since then, his eyes have been glued upwards.

What happened: For his contribution in jointly discovering over 100 planets from his backyard in Churchill, Stockdale has been awarded the 2026 Berenice and Arthur Page Medal from the Astronomical Society of Australia.

• The Page Medal is awarded every two years to honour excellence in amateur astronomy.

The Monitor visited Stockdale at his Churchill home to talk about the award and the cosmos Stockdale has spent so many years studying.

Personal observatory: Stockdale bought his first telescope in 1985, just before Halley’s Comet flew by.

In 2014, he decided to upgrade.

Where most backdecks of homes have barbecues or outdoor coaches, Stockdale’s has a walkway to a two metre tall white observatory.

Inside the dome, there’s a computer, a single stool and a telescope that Stockdale uses to peruse the night sky for undiscovered planets.

• Stockdale clearly didn’t hold back on expenses: the roof and the dome shutter is fully automatic.

“There's about $100,000 between the observatory, the telescope, the camera, the mount, and all the other bits and pieces that go with it,” Stockdale said.

How do you find an undiscovered planet?

Spotting planets outside our solar system can be difficult. They’re often small and dark in comparison to the enormous and bright stars that they spin around. 

Stockdale said the best way to spot them is to observe when a planet crosses in front of a star. 

“There’s a minuscule drop in light. The drop is somewhere between half-a-percent, so it's not very much,” he said.

Once he’s observed a potential object moving around a distant star, Stockdale then writes up a report and uploads the information to a NASA database, where it’s reviewed by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

If a report looks promising it can be double-checked by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a NASA space observatory launched in 2018 to discover planets orbiting nearby stars.

Stockdale said he’s written up over 400 reports on possible planets, and a quarter of them have been certified as planets.

• Planet Stockdale? Asked if he was able to name any of the planets he’d found, Stockdale said: “No, they get rather boring names like TOI500B, or something like that.”

The beauty of the cosmos: Even though Stockdale has spent decades looking up, he still finds the vastness of the cosmos mind boggling.

“It's kind of peaceful,” he said. “Whether you're looking at craters on the moon, the rings of Saturn, Jupiter's bands or globular clusters, where there's a million stars just glowing in the eyepiece.”

Want to get involved? Doctor Ben McCallister, a physicist at Swinburne University, told the Monitor: “It’s awesome to see Victorians getting involved in the long and storied history of citizen scientists making real impact in astronomy.”

“If you're inspired, and interested in getting involved in citizen astronomy - you don't need a big telescope - as long as you have an internet connection you can participate in really cool projects like Galaxy Zoo from your couch.”

• Galaxy Zoo invites anyone to classify images of galaxies according to their shapes, which helps scientists understand how these clusters evolved.

Cover image credit: NASA.