I just received a copy of The Sky is your laboratory which has a number of projects amateurs can try out.
One of the interesting comments in the book was around asteroid hunting. ( I want that job title on LinkedIn David, Asteroid Hunter).
Wavy,s dead right, with large scale professional surveys on the go with state of the art kit, odds are stuff has all been found, but having said that, you can find out where the pro stuff has been surveying in the last few days and make sure you aren’t covering old ground which for example for asteroid hunting is extremely helpful.(Minor Planet Centre)
But the question from the OP talks to contribution as well as discovery
Here’s the Index of projects amateurs could to contribute to.
- Meteor studies
- Visual counts
- Characterisation of minor meteor showers
- Sporadic meteors and undiscovered showers
- Occultation
- Lunar
- Grazing lunar
- Asteroid
- Variable star observations
- Photometry
- Variable stars
- Asteroid lightcurves
- Extra solar planet transits
- BVR photometry
- Asteroid phase curves
- Astrometry
- Asteroid astrometry
- Separation and position angle of binary stars
- Lunar meteor impacts
- Asteroid hunting and discovery
- Comet hunting
- Nova and supernova
- Meteor and fireball meteor patrol
- Spectroscopy
- Etc
- Plus the recent gravity wave project posted about here the other week.
Looking at the kit recommended, it’s not that different from what a lot of people here have so I don’t think you are limited by kit.
Some of this stuff doesn’t need dark skies either.
Each project has an organisation somewhere which will happily accept data that you have collected. The US Navy star catalogue org who deal with variable stars states when the data they have needs updating as an example.
And then there’s all the stuff people here been cited for such as new galaxies,etc or who contribute because someone asks for images of PN.
So, I still think there are plenty of opportunities to contribute.