al. 2012).[^1] Other then David and me, the HEK staff included Gáspár Bakos from Princeton University and Allan Schmitt from [PlanetHunters.org]{}. Small teams suit me well and knowing David from before I gladly accepted. My role in the team was to use [*Kepler*]{} TTVs, which David extracted with formidable speed and accuracy from the MAST catalog, to characterize planets.

The following part of the story, which eventually led to the detection and characterization of Kepler-46 and the publication of this work in the [*Science*]{} magazine, is best told by an email exchange among the HEK members. Below I reproduce excerpts from some of these emails along with short commentaries. In the following text, the dates of the emails are given in the US convention (MM/DD/YYYY).

[**From David K’s email to the HEK team (11/27/2011):**]{}

HCV-439 is the most interesting system. The system exhibits TTVs of $\sim$1 hour amplitude whereas none of the other systems have ‘clean’ TTVs like this.

I attach here the TTVs of the top four candidates. HCV-439 is the only one with a really convincing signal.

The highest priority is HCV-439. Could you please run your code on these TTVs and see what planetary solutions are valid 