“The
foundations of modern astronomy were laid largely by amateurs” (Ferris, Seeing
in the Dark, p. 33). Most of the men
whose work in astronomy is found throughout the history books saw it merely as
a pastime not something that could pay the rent, including Copernicus, Kepler,
and Halley. For one to study the skies
he usually needed to have a large bank account and not until the twentieth
century did astronomy become a career.
Yet, “even in the twentieth century, while they were being eclipsed by
the burgeoning professional class, amateurs continued to make valuable
contributions to astronomical research” (Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 35). The amateurs lagged behind the wealth and
technology afforded to the professionals until the 1980s when, specifically,
the Dobsonian telescope, developed by an American Buddhist monk, much cheaper
CCD light-sensing devices, and the Internet.
The Dobsonian allowed amateurs to view nebulae and galaxies that
otherwise before would have only been accessible to the wealthy and the
professionals, and at merely a few dollars cost combined with much labor,
should one be so inclined. The
affordability of charge-coupled devices, which can absorb light much more feint
than is possible with photographic plates, and their ability to digitally store
images of the universe allowed for much more exchange of information. Combine CCDs with the Internet, along
hundreds of millions of people instantaneous access to information and images,
and the age of the amateur had returned.
The Internet also enabled much more collaboration between amateurs and
professionals than ever before.
Although, “the amateur approach had its limitations. Amateurs insufficiently tutored in the
scientific literature sometimes acquired accurate data but did not know how to
make sense of it. Those who sought to
overcome their lack of expertise by collaborating with professionals sometimes
complained that they wound up doing most of the work while their more
prestigious partners got most of the credit… But many amateurs enjoyed fruitful
collaborations, and all were brought close to the stars” (Ferris, Seeing in the
Dark, p. 41).
“Professional
astronomy has been propelled for more than a century now by the advent of ever
larger telescopes, but big telescopes have their limitations. Typically they can image only small portions
of the sky at a time: All other things equal, larger aperture means longer
focal length, which means a more constrained field of view” (Ferris, Seeing in
the Dark, p. 50). So since the
professionals have the stronger, deeper,
telescopes they can get much more detailed images of the universe, but for that
same reason they miss out on most of what else is happening in the rest of the
sky. The number of amateurs of course
well outweighs the number of professionals - I doubt there would be enough
funding for it to be the opposite or even anywhere near close – so it just
makes sense that with all the amateurs out there more of the universe is apt to
be charted and discovered. More and more
connections are being made between amateurs and professionals as the gap
between the two shrinks. Databases
shared, conferences attended, papers
authored. “When it comes to doing real
science, what the amateurs to offer includes their numbers – there are perhaps
ten times as many experience amateurs as professional astronomers – and their
time “ (Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 56).
It will
likely be an amateur who one day in future will save the entire race of
humanity from extinction. How will he be
the one to do so when the professionals have such better fit equipment? Because he is out searching ever night for those
great traveling rocks of the sky, meteoroids.
Most meteors are asteroids, which can range in size anywhere from the
size of a small state down to a small insect.
Most of them get burned up in the atmosphere or bounce of before
entering but the ones that do make down to the ground are quite dangerous. “An asteroid one hundred meters in diameter
can flatten a city; a kilometer-class one could wind back the clock of human
civilization to the time of Vlad the Impaler; and a ten-kilometer comet would
exterminate most terrestrial life” (Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 162). So by these amateurs policing the galaxy for
these potential world-killers than in the future when we may be faced against
one, we will be prepared. Knowing the
orbit of a particular comet or asteroid of catastrophic size would allow us to
intercept it and alter its course well before it reaches the Earth (i.e. Armageddon) – we hope.
In 1993
Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy, at Palomar, discovered a comet
that had been captured inside of Jupiter’s gravitational field around 64 years
prior. The tidal pull of Jupiter had
finally begun pulling the comet apart, breaking it up into much smaller
pieces. However some of the largest
remaining wholes were well over five kilometers in diameter. The pieces followed each other in a line
orbiting the planet. “Starting on the
night of July 16, 1994, the comet fragments trundled in, one after another like
trucks skidding into a pileup on an icy highway. The exploded in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere in
extravagant, rising fireballs that left the giant planet’s salmon- and
sand-colored atmospheric bands scarred by a chain of lurid black splotches that
endured for weeks” (Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 168-9). This event really showed what potential these
vermin of the skies truly holds. Jupiter, 300 times as massive as Earth, and
1300 times larger than the Earth, was greatly affected by such a miniscule
meteoroid on the Jupiter scale. Had the
comet been flung into the inner solar system by Jupiter, as sometimes happens,
we could have experienced great catastrophy throughout the world.
Some day an
asteroid or comet will approach the Earth intent on utter annihilation and should
it have been charted, most likely by an amateur astronomer, we will have him or
her to thank for our survival after it has been rerouted or destroyed, because
without knowledge of these bodies whereabouts and practices we would be doomed.
This article originally written April 22, 2008 for OU HSCI 1133 - Science and Popular Culture.
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