Observation What About the Pro-Am Collaboration?

Amateur astronomy is a wide community. Hence centers of interest and fields of activity are numerous, from the observation, to telescope manufacturing or astrophotography. A feature of the community is that it always had too advanced amateurs who are striving to perform a science-level work, as they may, further, work together with professional astronomers. Binaries or variable stars observation are good examples of such fields. Such a pro-am collaboration mostly is due to that professional astronomers are externalizing such observations which would take too much observation time otherwise for their telescopes. Time passing, old fields of such works may tend to dim, as new ones are appearing. New tools like CCD imaging, software photometry, or amateur spectroscopy are opening new fields of activity for the amateur astronomers. Photometry seems the highest field of such an activity for amateurs: Centaurs, eclipsing binaries, active galaxies, exoplanets transits are the object of the studies. Sky surveys in such or such emission line, or spectroscopy of stars, planetary nebulae or planets may be interesting too. An example of equipment to allow the light-curve of transiting exoplanets is a 14-inch SCT, a CCD camera and a light-curve generator software. Several initiatives already exist to foster the pro-am colloboration. A good starting point for the quest of such initiatives may be at Sky & Telescope/SkyTonight.com. Digital imagery, generally, is now allowing amateur astronomers to pictures which usually were allowed to professional 1 to 5-meter telescopes only. Long exposures of deep-sky objects, for example, may help to reveal phenomena that may otherwise be missed in the relatively short snapshots taken by major telescopes, which are tightly scheduled and often oversubscribed by professional astronomers. 'Citizen Science,' or 'crowd-sourced science' as allowed through the Internet or other media, is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists, like professional astronomers are hiring amateurs to sparse raw data. A late example is, for example, how amateurs have pored over observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope looking for bubbles carved into interstellar clouds in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy by recently formed stars or to comb explanets databases gathered by the Kepler mission. Varied programs or space agencies, like NASA, are often calling to enlist the help of amateur astronomers in support of a space mission's objectives. One, for example, is to discover near-Earth objects (NEOs) and study their characteristics in support of the OSIRIS-Rex probe. Amateurs generally are also now important contributors in the refinement of orbits for newly discovered near-Earth objects. Another aspect of the pro-am collaboration resides into the outsourcement by professional astronomers of the sorting of large databases, like the shapes of galaxies, for example. The most recent field of coop between amateur and professional astronomers is the one of spectroscopy, which should allow amateurs to perform routine observations in addition to professionals' limited time of observation with large facilities