Blurring The Line: Non-Professionals as Observers & Data Analysts


Abstract:  It is well known that amateur observers are full of ability and enthusiasm.
Their sheer numbers are an important solution to problems such as weather and
longitudinal gaps in coverage of the sky. However, they are also sophisticated
professionals with experience and expertise in many high technology areas. They are
just as willing to use their computer as their telescope to help professional
astronomers. We present some ideas about how to leverage this untapped resource along
with some examples and best practices.



Introduction:  It is important to begin this discussion by redefining a popular term.
What we currently refer to as an "amateur community" is actually made up of amateurs,
students, retired professionals and those who hold astronomy degrees but chose to
pursue careers in another field. In addition, the pure "amateurs" are amateurs in
astronomy only. Most have successful careers in their own right and many have rare and
valuable skills in other areas of technology. As a result, as a whole I will refer to
the group as the "non-professional community" as the term amateur does not do their
skills justice.

The Situation
    Since the first eyeball looked up at the night sky astronomy has been dominated by
non-professionals. Astronomy is unique in that the entire world has access to the same
laboratory - the night sky. (It is a shame that that time may be coming to an end due
to light pollution.) In recent history (beginning perhaps with the court church and
court appointed astronomers) society has been fortunate enough to fund a few lucky
individuals to devote their careers to looking at the sky.  The numbers of these
"professionals" ebbs and flows based on politics, economics and technological
advances. Right now, thanks largely to the space age, professional astronomers abound.
However, this will change in the future.
    Public sector spending on astronomy will likely decline in the long run as a
percentage of the overall budget. In addition, new telescopes and technologies are
becoming very expensive. This is having the effect of halting construction of and
closing down small and medium sized observatories as universities and foundations pool
their money into a few behemoth projects. Astronomy is gaining access to new
technology to open up new frontiers, but it is losing a workforce. In addition, the
new technology is tremendously productive and creating large amounts of data. Modern
astronomical databases are becoming so large that key breakthroughs lie undiscovered.
Who better to mine this data than nonprofessionals who have been identified with an
affinity for and expertise in databases and computer science?
    At the same time, the level of technology is exploding among consumers. Consumer
grade detectors now rival professional detectors in their sensitivity. Private
individuals are building private meter class observatories. And the Internet has
brought about a revolution in computer science that allows almost anyone with access
to a computer to participate in scientific research and software development. The
first two examples I present are well known and have been covered in the press quite
adequately.  However, the last example remains a largely untapped resource.

Blurring The Line
   Non-professional astronomers have been doing their own data analysis for years. Any
CCD observer knows they have to spend as much time reducing data as observing. Once
armed with the data, their natural curiosity drove them to learn how to pull
information from it. Whether it is Fourier analysis looking for periodicity,
astrometry looking for minor planets or creating free software for the community they
were dong basic analysis. Many have taken this a step further and been published. Some
worked with a professional to get in a professional journal and some worked alone and
submitted to one of the few refereed journals that accepts non-professional papers.
These are the trailblazers (blazars!).

A Call to Keyboards!
    For every trailblazer there is a large number of people who are prepared to help
if they had coordination and leadership. Now is the time for the professional
community to tap this resource and help solve their manpower shortage. A program that
is setup to coordinate qualified non-professionals to work with professional projects
would be a huge success. The American Astronomical Society's Working Group on Pro-Am
Collaboration is working on creating a list of amateurs and their skills that
professionals can turn to for help. This is a good start. However, to be fully
effective a program needs centralized coordination and training. Non-professionals
have ability, but they still need to be trained on the levels of precision needed in
professional investigations. Also, managing non-professional volunteers can be very
time consuming so it requires an organizational with time and patience, the latter can
come from finding a resource that is truly enthusiastic about working with
non-professionals.
    The SETI@Home project was the first serious attempt to make use of this resource.
Their success illustrates the potential available to the astronomical community.
However, SETI@Home was a passive project that required very little on behalf of the
participant. There is much more that the community can do when properly organized. For
example, imagine the building of a computer science team. This team could consist of a
few programmers, a quality control professional and a technical writer. They could
work together to program software a professional needs to do their work. Another
example is a data mining team. A team of non-professionals could be given large stacks
of data (like MACHO data for example) and told to sift through the data looking for
specific information. A final example involves education and public outreach. Imagine
a team that consists of a journalist, a public relations professional, and an
illustrator. This team could be called upon by any professional who is about to
announce a major discovery. The team could draft press releases, get them into the
right hands and even illustrate it. This would give powerful E/PO capabilities to even
the smallest of astronomical organizations.
    The plan becomes very powerful when the teams build upon themselves! For example,
the computer science team could be asked to write a program that the data mining team
will use to look for micro lensing effects in a large photometric database. The data
mining team turns their results over to a professional, who culls through it more
carefully and pulls out the real positive results. He/She rights a paper and the E/PO
team puts out a press release about the project.
    There are many keys to success. First, the non-professionals have to be identified
based on their skillset and reliability. Second, teams must be put together and
trained (if needed). Third, the professional needs to clearly define the needs of the
project and be avalable to answer questions from the coordinator. Finally, the team
needs full ackowledgment of their contribution such as with co-authorship on any
published papers.
    There is also an important outreach aspect of this that should not be overlooked.
Each of these non-professionals are members of community distributed all over the
world. What better ambassador for science than an enthusiastic volunteer that is
actually participating and being part of science in action? They can be organized to
give talks to local clubs, museums and talk to local newspapers about their work. The
AAVSO has done this with our International High Energy Network which has given over
157 talks, papers and presentations in over 6 countries.

AAVSO Examples
    The AAVSO has developed this methodology for work on two key projects. First, we
have a team of members who are making new variable star charts and revising out old
ones. This team consists of observers who sky-check the fields, data miners who cull
through the various photometric databases looking for good comparison stars, a
programmer who works on a database we use to keep track of all the work and a team
leader who coordinates it all.  Some of these volunteers do not observe at all, they
just like to participate in the team! And our comparison sequence experts are so good
at knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the photometric databases out there that
sometimes *they* get asked questions by professionals. We have a similar team working
to document every comparison star on every AAVSO chart. It is a project that is
creating a giant photometric database of over 50,000 stars and will be extremely
valuable to the professional community. The project is made exclusively up of
non-professionals who work almost every night on it. Both teams are successful because
they each have a professional who keeps an eye on activities and throws out some
advice every now and then.
    The AAVSO is about to take this project to the next level. All 11 million+
observations in the AAVSO International Database is being validated and will be online
for download by the end of 2004. In order to make sure all the data is used we will be
training our members on data analsysis and mining techniques and giving them stars to
investigate. We received a grant from the AAS to write three Windows-based programs
(and ports that will run on Linux and OS X) which will do basic time series analysis
including fourier and wavelet transforms.

Summary: Non-professional astronomers hold a key for the future success of astronomy.
They can help mitigate the effects of budget consolidation and increasing demands on
existing manpower. The key is to effectively organize and train them to leverage the
skills they acquire in their careers and apply them to astronomy. Astronomy will get
an enthusiastic work force of highly skilled labor and the public will get a
grassroots network of science enthusiasts. It is a win-win scenario for both.

Acknowledgements: This paper is dedicated to Dr. Janet Mattei, who did as much as
anyone to turn pro-am collaboration into a scientifically valid and accepted
relationship.