I have friends with telescopes and I love the website APOD, Astronomy Picture of the Day.*** The original pictures on the site were often NASA or JPL, but nowadays the pictures are just as often from non-NASA personnel, amateur photographers with their telescopes out chasing astronomical phenomena. They take some brilliant pictures.
All the same, amateur scientists have a hard time these days. The equipment needed to move forward in many fields is often only accessible at universities or government labs, and the knowledge base may be overwhelming to acquire later in life. I believed that there was an exception to this in astronomy, where amateurs with telescopes had been the first to discover a number of recent comets. However, when I did some research, I discovered that I’m about ten years behind the times.
This url popped up. http://www.nightskyhunter.com/Visual%20Comet%20Hunting.html The guy has lots of commentary on finding comets and big names of amateurs but, though it isn’t obvious, I’m pretty sure this article is eight or ten years old. (This gentleman is currently writing about clouds and the atmosphere, and his pictures are gorgeous. http://www.nightskyhunter.com/index.html )
Next I found a worksheet from NASA designed to give students percentage problems, based upon amateurs finding comets. https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/Grade35/10Page45.pdf The worksheet has a chart from 1999 through 2012, comparing amateurs, spacecraft, and observatories. For example…
“Problem 1 – During 2010, what percentage of comet discoveries were made by amateur astronomers, spacecraft, and ground-based observatories?”
However, since 2012, amateur sky watchers have been overtaken by huge sky surveys done with automated equipment designed to find even “tiny” asteroids that are coming towards the earth. The dates on the first hits on Google for amateur comet hunter (yes, I know), are mostly back around 2011. One goes back to 1988. It is still possible for amateurs to find comets first as shown by this Japanese gentleman from 2021…
… but the percentages have shifted heavily against them.
All this reminded me of an earlier moment. Seismology used to be called the Jesuit Science because the Jesuits had a lot of data. They had a lot of data because Father Frederick Odenbach (1857-1933) and Father James Macelwane (1883-1956), brilliant Catholic scientists, leveraged the Jesuit network of schools and the invention of seismographs. Any seismograph can show that there has been an event that shook the earth. With three or more instruments, the location of the event can be determined.
It was Father Odenbach’s genius to realize that the Jesuit schools in the United States could all have an instrument installed and monitored by reasonably competent personnel. Then they could share data. He also realized that the seismographs had to be of the same kind in order for the data to be really comparable. What’s funny about that is that he himself had invented a seismograph, but I don’t think that is the kind that became the standard. However, it certainly would have helped him to understand the issues involved.
Father Macelwane more or less invented geophysics for himself, when he was studying in California. He helped to found the American Geophysical Union in the 1920’s and revived Father Odenbach’s ideas.
In the late ’50’s and ’60’s the US government more or less took over the idea of a network of seismographs, especially because such a network could detect underground explosions of a non-natural kind… and eventually that was the end of seismographs in every Jesuit school.
***Follow this link to a gorgeous picture of Saturn from two days ago. I couldn’t figure out who owned the copyright on the picture, so I didn’t bring it over but there’s a gorgeous rabbit hole waiting in the shape of the Cassini mission. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240623.html
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