Backyard telescopes and amateur eyes see where “pro” astronomers can’t
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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!
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.
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.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~assassin/index.shtml
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:
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/Nikon-Products/Product/Camera-Len...
With one detector, at about $40k.
https://telescopes.net/store/pl23042-1-bi-proline-series-e2v...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Other efforts like this include: - American Association of Variable Star Observers https://www.aavso.org/public - Center for Backyard Astrophysics http://cbastro.org/
and I'm sure there are others I don't know about.
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/
https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Dark-Astronomers-Discovering-U...
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.