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Congratulations! And in Nature Comms too, what a way to start your publication history! (I'm assuming it's your first publication, apologies if not)
There is a growing trend in the "professional" science community to try to make more and effective use of "amateur" research (though Trevor's contribution sounds a bit more professional-grade than what that usually means), with e.g. Zooniverse etc. (they list some citizen scientists by name on the papers from time to time, e.g. the Tabby's star paper has 2 amateurs on it). Astronomy is a great field for this, exactly because of communities like IIS, (and e.g. the standard of equipment owned by some of their members!). We have projects in the works for enabling some of this, including a research-grade exoplanet-hunting spectrograph the size of an esky which we hope to get down to "amateur-level" pricing per-unit, and Google is investing in even cheaper technology to distribute astronometry data gathering for under US$5k per unit, so it's something you'll (hopefully) definitely see more of. All, in no small part, due to the dedicated "semi-pros" like Trevor who lead the way!
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