Astronomy has a long and proud history of contributions from amateurs. Amateurs are probably best known (at least to me) for discovering supernovae. I mentioned in another comment to this article that a friend of mine from grad school worked on a project called ASAS-SN, which uses a network of small, cheap telescopes to monitor the entire night sky every few days. Their stated goal was to use this network to discover supernovas (hence the SN in the name), but, of course, they have discovered a bunch of other interesting things as well. It was only a year or two ago that they discovered more supernovae than amateur astronomers. Prior to that, amateurs consistently discovered far more supernovae than professional astronomers. Interestingly, the most prolific discoverers were in Japan, because they could discover all the supernovae that went off over the Pacific Ocean that had already set for observers on the West Coast of the US.
Another field that involves lots of work from amateurs is microlensing. In a microlensing event, one star passes in front of another, and its gravity lenses the light from the star behind it. This produces a characteristic increase and decrease in the brightness of the background star over the course of a day or so. If the lensing star (the star in the middle) has a planet, this will distort the brightness curve. These sorts of observations are extremely time-sensitive, and its critical that data is collected during certain, very narrow bands of time. Weather or other observing priorities sometimes prevent professional astronomers from observing these events, so it's not uncommon that data in some of the crucial times are provided by amateurs.
And there are lots of other areas that amateurs have contributed enormously to! Asteroid discovery, monitoring variable stars (https://www.aavso.org/), and even exoplanet discovery! In many ways the term "amateur" does a disservice to amateur astronomers because their setups can be quite sophisticated --- the only thing "amateur" about them is that they don't get paid for all the great work they do!
Quick note on the word 'amateur', I understand that it originally connoted someone who 'loves' something. It would be nice to get back to that meaning in the public understanding of the word, particularly now global groups of amateurs are empowered by the internet.
Since the current usage means people who do something without being paid, emphasizing the "love" would shift meanings quite a bit. For example, I have to assume that many professional (paid, that is) astronomers also love what they do...
> But with limited telescope time available, their views of the planets only come in snatches.
It seems silly that university astronomy departments don't invest in small arrays of these telescopes with automated tracking software deciding where to point each night. With a modest number of sites you could have global coverage of all nearby objects of interest regardless of foul weather in some spots.
But you know, they need more money to expand administration instead.
Each of the telescopes is an off-the-shelf commercial telephoto lens hooked up to a CCD, for a total cost of ~$100,000 per telescope. I'm a little fuzzy on the details now, but I think they have something like four cameras on a single mount, and sites in Hawaii and Chile with plans to put another mount in South Africa (or maybe Australia?). The eventual goal will be to have continuous coverage of the sky, and new images of any given patch of the sky every ~3 days or so.
They made a bit of press a while back for discovering the most luminous supernova ever, ASASSN-15lh:
$100,000 is too much to scale up without serious funding. I'd guess most of that was wasted on a scientific camera that is priced for low volume sales. Mr. McKeon captured useful images here on a ~$3000 telescope and a $230 1.2Mpix camera. A spectacular system could be put together with mostly off the shelf parts using a 4K CCD camera, alt-azimuth mount, coupling optics and filters, and data handling for $20K. Put 5 telescopes at 20 sites and you have up to 100 nightly video streams to comb through for scientific data. All for $2M. Less than what many coaches make in a year.
I don't remember what the scientific requirements were that necessitated the $100,000 lens (which isn't really scientific --- it's mostly sold to professional photographers), but given how limited funding is I'm sure that if they could have gotten away with a cheaper lens they would have. (Thinking back, the lens may have been closer to $60,000. It wasn't my project so I can't really remember.)
There are cheaper lenses and CCDs which might strike a better price/performance ratio too -- I think that was the original thought behind saying "100k is too expensive!".
Of course, those items you linked are beautiful machines of precision and quality. But maybe with a cheaper system, more targets can be tracked at the same time. So a $1k lens with a $1k sensor in a $500 tracker gets you 40 "telescopes" for $100k instead of 1~2.
Something permenant, with supplied utilities (power+hvac+data), secured behind locked doors, with a reasonable view of the sky, on a university campus .... you are pretty near to 100k before spending a dime on the actual hardware. And then double every number if you want it under retractable roof/cover of some sort.
One-off temporary or unofficial rigs on rooftops can be cheap. But a system of installed, standardized, telescopes on university campuses won't be build on a shoestring. If you are going to do it, get the lens that makes it worth the while.
Is the $100,000 just the telescope or does it include software, the expertise to setup and maintain, and all the other peripherals I imagine it'd need?
That is basically what we have built at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (lcogt.net). We have ~20 telescopes around the globe, all on a single network that essentially distributes a queue of observations to where and when they are most likely to be observed. The result is 24/7 coverage of the both the northern and southern hemispheres.
It's a lot harder than you'd think. There is no such thing as an off the shelf professional grade telescope, so we employ a large engineering team to actually build them. Scopes and their instruments are complex and made of many independent systems and require a TON of software to run without an human operator (and even with). Scheduling observations is another challenge, an np-complete one actually. Then there's the problem of analyzing and storing gigabytes of data a day.
As a member of the relatively small software team, we have a TON to do. But it's a really cool problem to work on!
Hey, that looks amazing! I was wondering about the software/hardware controlling the telescopes themselves, but cannot find any information on it on the website, is there any link, or that's more "behind the scenes"/non-public info?
The software controlling the telescopes is a collection of java agents using JADE: http://jade.tilab.com/
There are many agents with different responsibilities,from driving the cameras themselves, to the mount, dome, autoguiders, etc. We use a pubsub based model to keep them all in the know.
I worked at the Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics at $respected_university for about 10 years, and I think your comments aren't super accurate as a description of a solution to their problems and I don't think the ending snark is accurate or necessary.
Go look at any major astro department, and you'll see there's not a lot of fat to be trimmed. I was "administration" as you probably consider it, but they do actually need sysadmins to keep things running so everyone else can focus on the science. I can assure you there weren't enough of us. There weren't any asst. deans of pencil sharpening or whatever sucking up the department's valuable funds.
To your earlier point, if they thought they were useful, I'm sure someone would have bought such an array. In fact, two of the above commenters mentioned such a project. The thing to keep in mind is that these things aren't free. You need engineers to put them together, professors to write the grants, software engineers and grad students to write the software, trips to go set them up, grad students to do the analysis, etc. Those all cost money.
None of the professors at my university (and most other universities with which we interacted) were interested in the subjects described in the articles as good candidates for amateur telescopes though, so it's kind of irrelevant. Whether that's where their interests truly lay or whether that's where the grant money is, I couldn't say. At any rate, all the visual spectrum experimentalists in the department needed big telescopes in clear places for long exposures to study their chosen subjects.
Additionally, at least in my department, the visual spectrum experimentalists were a distinct minority, maybe about 10% of the faculty. The rest were theoreticians (50% or so), microwave astronomers, radio astronomers, x-ray astronomers, etc. My university has been historically theory-heavy so that may be different elsewhere.
Would the experimentalists have liked more time on Keck, Hubble, Chandra, VLA, etc.? I'm certain they would have, but a few dozen backyard 30cm telescopes aren't going to get the job done.
There need to be people to actually look at all the footage. More telescopes is not really enough. And there is significant effort involved in amateur astronomy. It takes a long time to learn all the tricks to pull the data from the photos and videos, and lots of time to edit each photograph and video using the software tools available.
Besides that, there are rather a lot of objects of interest. The Herschel catalogue contains 400 objects. The NGC catalogue contains thousands. Then there's comets, asteroids, planets, the sun.
Universities really aren't well enough funded for the kind of investment that would be needed to cover everything. Given that they are already spending millions on big telescopes, that's quite clear.
It's not quite as easy as you might think, but there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-STARRS. The data analysis is quite a challenge, though. According to that site, the data rate from the PS1 telescope is ~ 10TB/night.
Hubble is nearing its end of life. I always hoped that robotics would have advanced enough to replace aging parts before it re-entered the earth's atmosphere. Webb and Hubble could both be fully utilized.
Hubble still has 5 years of use planned, and won't decay before 2030. Plenty of time to get the infrastructure in place for a servicing mission by an Orion capsule or even a robotic mission.
This extends to more than just planets, too. The University of Maryland Observatory runs a summer program for amateur astronomers that I signed up for this year, and we're learning how to do exoplanet transit detection. There are databases to look up candidates and ways to submit data to reinforce findings. It's doable with typical telescopes available to amateurs, and the observatory has a few larger scopes we're learning to use. One of the professors at UMD has written up guides on how to do it: http://www.astrodennis.com/
In undergrad astro my long-term project was searching for eclipsing binary stars, which are paired stars that are aligned with us just right so that they eclipse each other as they orbit. We looked one by one at known variable stars that are easily found by taking a series of wide angle shots of the sky and watching for periodic variations in brightness. The reason we had to look at one star at a time was because we wanted to characterize the light spectrum as being either shifting (pulsing single star) or mostly constant.
It always blew me away that the reason we had a project like that to do was because not every star had been looked at.
This was before Kepler data came out and it will not really apply once LSST starts kicking ass.
The LSST is a new kind of telescope. Currently under construction in Chile, the LSST is designed to conduct a ten-year survey of the dynamic universe. LSST can map the entire visible sky in just a few nights; each panoramic snapshot with the 3200-megapixel camera covers an area 40 times the size of the full moon." - https://www.lsst.org/
Russell Williams Porter, one of the founders of "amature" telescope making and lead the movement to make telescopes affordable to the average person. He is an unsung hero of modern astronomy and general badass. For more info on him: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/a-root-of-amat...
This is an interesting trend, which is also happening in other fields such as genomics. Many sciences started off as amateur pursuits before they became professionalized. Technological advances are allowing some of these fields to move back in favour of the amateur. This opens up some nice possibilities for the serious hobbyist; it's surely more satisfying to conduct some original research than to waste time on the web or playing video games.
Personally, astronomy has always been an escape from the electronic world for me, so I've never been drawn to the imaging side with its CCD cameras and computer equipment. But I do know a couple of people who really love it, and they certainly find it rewarding. I'm happy to stick with my binoculars and 12" Dobsonian, but for someone with a bit of spare cash who wants the chance to make a contribution to science, the opportunities are there.
Another field that involves lots of work from amateurs is microlensing. In a microlensing event, one star passes in front of another, and its gravity lenses the light from the star behind it. This produces a characteristic increase and decrease in the brightness of the background star over the course of a day or so. If the lensing star (the star in the middle) has a planet, this will distort the brightness curve. These sorts of observations are extremely time-sensitive, and its critical that data is collected during certain, very narrow bands of time. Weather or other observing priorities sometimes prevent professional astronomers from observing these events, so it's not uncommon that data in some of the crucial times are provided by amateurs.
And there are lots of other areas that amateurs have contributed enormously to! Asteroid discovery, monitoring variable stars (https://www.aavso.org/), and even exoplanet discovery! In many ways the term "amateur" does a disservice to amateur astronomers because their setups can be quite sophisticated --- the only thing "amateur" about them is that they don't get paid for all the great work they do!