The Kepler Guest Observer Program

Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission to identify and characterize Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone around Solar-like stars. The Kepler instrument also provides an unprecedented opportunity to test and refine a diverse range of astrophysical paradigms with high-precision, uniform and rapid cadence data, containing none of the diurnal or seasons gaps that limit ground-based observations. In this talk I will present the Kepler mission, it's archive and Guest Observer program, and provide scientific highlights of the early astrophysics programs conducted though community-proposed target observations and public archive exploitation.