Kepler Field of View

The Kepler mission will be looking continuously at over 100,000 stars in one region of the sky, in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations. The field of view is extremely large for an astronomical telescope. Most telescopes such as Hubble Space Telescope only view a small region at one time, about the size of a grain of sand held at arms length. Kepler covers a much larger field, about an hand at arm’s length or 2 dips from the Big Dipper. The field of view is overhead at midnight in the middle of summer for those in the mid-Northern latitudes, and earlier in the evening in late summer and fall.