The N2K Consortium is a collaborative multinational effort by American, Chilean and Japanese astronomers to find additional extrasolar planets around stars that are not already being surveyed.
The N2K is shorthand for the set of roughly 2,000 of the nearest and most luminous main sequence stars that were selected to be newly surveyed.
Target stars have a B - V color index value between 0.4 and 1.2, a visual magnitude brighter than 10.5, and a distance of less than 110 pc from the Sun.
Those stars showing radial velocity variations are then checked with the automated photometric telescopes from Fairborn Observatory.
[1] During a two-year run beginning in 2004, the N2K Consortium was predicted to detect about 60 new hot Jupiters.