Commentary

The Amateur and the Professional

Last January Jay McNeil, an amateur astronomer in Paducah, Kentucky, discovered a nebula with his three-inch refracting telescope. The nebula appeared when a young star became brighter and illuminated the nebula, which is an event that is rarely seen. This observation spurred the professional community to observe the area in the optical, infrared, and x-ray wavelength, and to examine the region in archival photographic plates.

Despite the sophistication of professional astronomy, the amateur astronomer continues to be a productive source of observational data. The professional astronomer is concerned with understanding unusual or distant phenomena. Usually such phenomena require large instruments, which are expensive to create and maintain, or instruments placed into space, which are unaffordable to all but the richest countries. Time on such instruments is in high demand, and so the committees that grant time are careful to give it to researchers deemed to be studying the most interesting problems in astrophysics. This leaves a large area of research untouched, because many interesting research topic are not judged to be of high priority within the professional community, or because the probability of success is small, or because observations done with the professional instruments cannot improve upon observations done with smaller instruments. This limitation of professional astronomy is an opportunity for the amateur community, and it is likely to persist. With the rapid development of cheap digital cameras and the proliferation of computers and Internet communications, amateurs can easily and cheaply produce their own high-quality observatories that produce valuable observations.

For some of us, the relationship of amateur astronomy to professional astronomy is similar to the relationship of amateur athletics to professional athletics. Like a little-leaguer, we first flirted with the stars as children peering thorough telescopes. The stars have a romance that draws many of us to them. The latest pictures of a galaxy or a nebula always attracted our attention. But as in atheletics, some of the romance of astronomy is lost when we move to the professional community.

My own interest in astronomy started the night my father took me into the yard to watch pass overhead the Echo 2 satellite, which was a passive communications satellite that was nothing more than a giant balloon. That evening, it was the brightest object in the sky, and it dashed rapidly across the sky until it suddenly disappeared into Earth's shadow. From that point on astronomy was always a part of my life. When there was a partial eclipse, my father took an old refrigerator box, turned it on its side, and converted it into a giant pinhole camera; we children sat in the box and watched the image of the sun gradually go to a cresent. Living in San Diego, California, our family made a trip to Palomar Observatory to see the Hale telescope, which was at that time the largest telescope in the world. Growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, near the Marshall Space Flight Center, we would feel the roar of the Saturn V on the test stand ten miles away. My early childhood treasures were the Norton's Star Atlas and the three volumes of Scientific American's Amateur Telescope Making. My proudest achievement was grinding my own 4-inch mirror.

One of my surprises as a graduate student was that this type of background was not typical. When I helped with the open houses at the Harvard University Observatory, I found that despite being a theoretical astrophysicist, I had a better knowledge of the small-telescope sky than many of the observers, and, embarrassingly, some of the visitors had a better knowledge of this than I. In that time observers saw the sky through television screens, and they let the computer drive the telescope to the proper position on the sky. The star-hopping of my youth was an alien exercise to them.

And now, does an observer even go to the telescope, or is he limited to being an analyst of data collected by a technician? Certainly researchers who use satellite data never step foot outside of their office.

Modern astronomy is highly abstract. The beautiful pictures from observatories and satellites are of far less importance than the plots of spectra and of light curves. We learn how objects work from the numbers we collect, from the correlation functions and Fourier transforms we construct, from the chi-square fits of the data to theoretical models, and from the plots and diagrams created by our computer simulations. Modern astronomy is done in an office in front of a computer.

This abstractness gives the astronomical world a certain unreality. The evolution of a star is a series of lines on an Hertzsprung-Russell diagram constructed by a computer. The jet from an active galaxy is a false-color density and pressure map. The structure of a neutron star's atmosphere is a series of equations that describe its equation of state, opacity, conductivity, and radiation density. Is it any wonder that we feel compelled to populate this world with hypothetical objects, objects that are not seen and are not necessary to explain our world, objects that correspond to the monsters that fill the uncharted spaces of ancient maps?

The professional astronomer is often unfamiliar with the visible sky. Once, while leaving a restaurant outside of Taos, New Mexico, I saw some of my colleagues standing in the dirt parking lot looking at the sky, trying to pull the constellations out from the multitude of stars. The restauraunt was in the desert countryside, surrounded only by desert shrubs, and the moonless, clear sky was so bright with stars that you felt like you were floating in the plane of the Milky Way. Suddenly a meteor streaked across the sky, and together the whole group cried out in surprised excitement. This was followed by a second, and then a third, and with each meteor the group cried out.

The amateur has an advantage over the professional astronomer in this one thing: he can appreciate the sky from where he stands and feel that what he sees is part of his daily world. Sometimes it is not enough to know how stars evolve, nebula glow, or quasars shine; sometimes we need to see them with our own eyes to appreciate them as part of our world.