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Comment by z3phyr | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we should have more fundamental science collectives where amateurs can also contribute, in addition to academic and state funded institutions. Sort of like amateur astronomy clubs [Amateur astronomers still contribute widely to their field(s)], in larger scale and contributing in much more significant ways.

Yes to more amateur scientist articles on HN!

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As you mentioned, astronomy is a field where contributions by amateurs / citizen scientists are extremely valuable. A few organizations that exemplify this are: (1) the American Association of Variable Star Astronomers (disclaimer, I'm their Executive Director) which collects photometric (brightness) data as well as spectroscopic data on variable stars and kindred objects including exoplanets (2) the Society for Astronomical Sciences which is more broad than AAVSO, but with a moderate focus on instrumentation (3) the Center for Backyard Astrophsyics (hyper specialized on one type of variable star, a good collaborator of the AAVSO) (4) the International Occultation and Timing Association that observe asteroids occulting (blocking) stars to infer their shapes

Most countries have organizations similar to these too.

Edit: There is a group within the SAS working on an automated optical spectrograph for astronomy called the FlexSpec 1 (https://flexspec1.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). It is about $500 in parts. Similar devices sell for about $3,000.

How plausible would it be to contribute if you live in fairly bright suburbs?

Suburbs aren't as bad as you might imagine. I observe from my patio under Bortle 6 skies (you can looks yours up at https://flexspec1.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) with a 5" telescope. We use to have a robotic telescope located in Cambridge, MA and it produced useful science.

The author's clearly not an amateur. He's a condensed matter postdoc.

I think there's an argument to say that he was doing it as part of his work, but I'll make this point anyway: if he was doing it for fun and to entertain people in a way unrelated to his actual job, wouldn't it still be "amateur science"? The same way that if a premier league footballer or an MLB hall of famer went with their family to play a game in the park, that's amateur football/baseball despite being done by a professional.

And while one could argue that the words used were "amateur scientist" rather than "amateur science", it could also be argued the opposite direction by suggesting that tag might not actually apply to the author but instead to the type of content since it's to be read and perhaps replicated by amateur scientists more than professional ones.

Or we could just celebrate the article regardless of the accuracy of someone's throwaway remark's categorisation of it :p

> more fundamental science collectives where amateurs can also contribute

Look anywhere there is field work out in nature, there's amateurs discovering new species, fossils, minerals etc.

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