The target list for K2 Campaign 0 (C0) was released earlier today. C0 is an engineering test primarily to learn about pointing over en entire campaign, but we hope to do some amazing science. The test will begin next week and is designed to last around 75 days. We will target over 7500 stars and galaxies, with targets including cool stars, bright stars, nearby galaxies, a pulsar, red giants, cataclysmic variables, and many more.

However, the most exciting thing to me is that we are going to put a giant pixel mask over the open cluster M35. There are so many stars of interest in this cluster we decided to get the whole thing. What will be learn? Firstly I hope we will find some planets orbiting the (relatively) young stars in this cluster. Do planets form in clusters, what sizes are they? Do they look different from planets in the Kepler field? Additionally, we can learn about how fast every star rotates helping us to understand how to measure a star’s age from its spin rate.

The green regions are the pixels that are going to downlinked to Earth for one of K2′s 76 functional CCD channels. As you can see, there is a giant continuous region – this is the open cluster M35.

Link to C0 information: http://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov/K2/Fields.shtml