Quote:
Originally Posted by higginsdj
Hmmm, maybe not. A recent professional view expressed to me was that things such as spectroscopy and even asteroid discovery attempts by amateurs has no scientific benefit.
The Professional surveys are covering almost the entire nights sky regularly (though not regularly enough for rapid transient events such as asteroid lightcurves and many variable stars) with scopes far bigger and equipment with far more expensive and capable equipment than an amateur could possibly hope for. Yes an amateur can get to a target sooner than the Pros might but to what end? The Pros will have covered that target within a year with their own equipment.
For those who were unaware, Arne Hendon of the AAVSO is heading the first ever decadal survey for amateurs to look at what Amateur and Pro collaborations should be doing in the period 2012-2021. I urge anyone interested in doing collaborative work for science to follow this:
http://sites.google.com/site/amastro2012/
If you are just doing the work for yourself (prove to yourself you can do it or you want to follow your own theories) - then obviously you can do what ever you want, but note that there maybe no actual scientific benefit in what you do.
The point is, if amateurs wish to contribute to science, then they need to target what science needs rather than what is of most interest to the amateur!
Cheers |
Who were these professionals??. Sound like arrogant SOB's to me. They have to remember this...they can't get access to a scope 100% of the time (more than likely not even 10-20% of the time). So, once that large NEO shoots on by and it's 6 months later they realise just how close it came because they've done an ephemeris on its orbit (when it's now a billion miles away), just how much easier it would've been to have nice piccies and orbital elements done by some amateur who has 100% access to a scope and is more than capable of doing the work needed. Next time they asked for help I'd be telling them to go jump. I feel like taking some pretty piccies tonight.
What they don't realise is that amateurs can keep an eye on so much stuff for far longer than they can and be studying things on a far more regular basis, that by the time they get a chance to study something themselves, they may have missed things vitally important. No point in extrapolating out a light curve for a supernova in it's earliest stages of explosion when you've caught the damn thing several months too late to do so. Even these uber sky surveys won't give them hours notice of an event. They may miss vital hours or days of info just because they have to process the images and then organise them into a meaningful format to view. Like PanSTARRS....it'll take more than a day or so to process the images from this survey. That I can assure you. One night's viewing and you have a 10-20 terabyte piccie to process. Even with the best of computers, more like a week later!!!!.
But even more mundane tasks, like keeping an eye on variable stars and such. It's not like they have the science down pat on all the various mechanisms for variability....far from it. And, as if they're going to get heaps of time on Keck, Spitzer or Hubble to be staring at individual stars just to see if they're variables or what variability they do show. Where are they going to get all their valuable info from??. I'm sure they can all fork out for personal metre class scopes or have large numbers of them at their universities so they'll have access all the time to a scope.
Nope, that professional opinion you were made privy to is nothing more than hubris and a great misunderstanding of the capabilities of quite a number of amateurs in the general astronomy community. Yes, you can't be expected to know all the theory behind the stuff you're looking at...that's why there's uni courses on the subject and why these guys have PhD's and research experience. But you can certainly know enough to be able to undertake the data collection and reduction, especially when some guidance is involved. In the process, you get to learn a bit of the science and how it's done, they get the data they need.