Mountain Views News          Saturday, March 15, 2014

BENEFITS ON BOTH SIDES 
HOMES & PROPERTY Mountain Views-News Saturday, March 15, 2014 
14 
BENEFITS ON BOTH SIDES 
HOMES & PROPERTY Mountain Views-News Saturday, March 15, 2014 
14 
There are new rules regarding short sales meant to improve the experience for both sellers and buyers, 
but the legalities and legwork can overwhelm even the most savvy. Of course, that's where the real 
estate agent shines, handling the paperwork and the phone calls, leaving you to focus on your move.
Keep in mind that if you're expecting to buy a home on short sale, you can get a great deal, but don't 
expect miracles from a bank that has agreed to accept a price lower than what the sellers owe on their 
mortgage. These short sales often generate multiple offers, and if a home has been approved to sell for 
$200,000, don't expect to waltz in and offer $125,000. 

The real advantage of a short sale deal is that the home will likely be in much better physical condition 
than its foreclosure counterpart. Often, a foreclosed home will have been abandoned for months, and 
perhaps trashed before being vacated. A short sale property in better condition is in and of itself a 
benefit with real value that offsets any lower price you could offer on a foreclosure.
And for sellers, a short sale preserves your dignity, reduces some of the stress, and won't damage 
your credit history as much as a foreclosure. Whether selling or buying, consult an agent for the best 
results.


NASA’S KEPLER MISSION ANNOUNCES PLANET BONANZA 
THE WORLD AROUND US 
NASA’s Kepler mission recently announced the discovery of 715 new 
planets. These newly verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-
planet systems much like our own solar system. This brings to nearly 
1700 the total number of “exoplanets” found thus far within our galaxy.

 “The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet-
hunting results,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s 
Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “That these new planets and 
solar systems look somewhat like our own portends a great future when 
we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new 
worlds.”

 Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system roughly 
two decades ago, verification has been a laborious planet-by-planet 
process. Now, scientists have a statistical technique that can be applied to 
many planets at once when they are found in systems that harbor more 
than one planet around the same star.

 To verify this bounty of planets, a research team co-led by Jack Lissauer, 
planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, 
Calif., analyzed stars with more than one potential planet, all of which 
were detected in the first two years of Kepler’s observations—May 2009 
to March 2011.

 “Four years ago, Kepler began a string of announcements—of first 
hundreds, then thousands, of planet candidates—but they were only 
candidate worlds,” said Lissauer. “We’ve now developed a process to verify 
multiple-planet candidates in bulk to deliver planets wholesale, and have 
used it to unveil a veritable bonanza of new worlds.” 

KEPLER THE MAN – The man for whom this mission was named 
deserves to be better known. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was born in 
Germany (then part of the Holy Roman Empire). He was a sickly child and 
his parents were poor. But his evident intelligence earned him a scholarship 
to the University of Tübingen to study for the Lutheran ministry. There he 
was introduced to the ideas of Copernicus and delighted in them. In 1596, 
while a mathematics teacher in Graz, he wrote the first outspoken defense 
of the Copernican system, the Mysterium Cosmographicum. 

Forced to leave his teaching post at Graz during the Counter 
Reformation because he was Lutheran, Kepler moved to Prague and 
became an assistant to the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. 
He inherited Tycho’s post as Imperial Mathematician when Tycho died in 
1601. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered 
that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 (the same year in which 
Galileo pointed the first telescope to the stars), Kepler published his own 
discoveries, which are now called Kepler’s first two laws of planetary motion. 

A LIST OF JOHANNES KEPLER’S “FIRSTS”: 

• 
First to correctly explain planetary motion 
• 
First to investigate the formation of pictures with a pinhole camera 
• 
First to explain the process of vision by refraction within the eye 
• 
First to formulate eyeglass designing for nearsightedness and farsightedness 
• 
First to explain the use of both eyes for depth perception 
• 
First to describe: real, virtual, upright and inverted images and magnification 
The artist concept depicts multiple-transiting planet systems, which are stars with more than one planet. The planetseclipse or transit their host star from the vantage point of the observer. This angle is called edge-on.
Image Credit: NASA 


• 
First to explain the principles of how a telescope works 
• 
His book Stereometrica Doliorum formed the basis of integral calculus 
• 
First to explain that the tides are caused by the Moon 
• 
First to suggest that the Sun rotates about its axis 
• 
First to try using stellar parallax caused by the Earth’s orbit to measure the distance to the stars 
You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@MtnViewsNews.com