Kudos for the Minor Stars
Mars, Venus, Saturn, Mercury and Jupiter have been visible to the unaided eye just after twilight for the last few days. Such poor man’s celestial feasts are regarded as increasingly uncommon. When Caltech astronomers announced the discovery of a planet-ish body far beyond Pluto last month, for instance, some predicted a waning of amateur astronomy. No backyard stargazer, it was said, could possibly compete with the high-tech equipment that professionals used to detect the farthest-known object in the solar system, a dark-red chunk of ice and rock named Sedna, now 8 billion miles from the sun.
However, amateur astronomers still have a thing or two to teach us. The most avid of them gathered two weeks ago for stargazing “marathons” named for amateur astronomer Charles Messier, who helped identify 110 celestial objects in the 18th century. Most of the stargazers used digital cameras, computers, software and broadband communications -- sophisticated technology that gives them the leg up they need to compete with the pros.
Amateurs are every bit as vital to astronomy today as in 1781, when William Herschel, the son of a German army musician, discovered Uranus with telescopic mirrors that he had ground out of copper, tin and antimony. Consider, for example, the two hours of photographic exposures that 32-year-old Jay McNeil made in January on a cold and windy night in his backyard in the Bluegrass Country of Paducah, Ky.
McNeil’s day job as a TV satellite dish installer kept him from scanning the images for days, but when he found time to peruse them on his laptop he noticed “a funky-looking, tiny, elongated object.” The conical plume of gas, astronomers recently confirmed, was the birth of a star 1,500 light-years away: an object, now known as McNeil’s Nebula, that is believed to be the first nebula discovered by an amateur astronomer in 65 years.
As any schoolchild who asks “Why is Pluto considered a planet?” will discover, some astronomical secrets are still a long way from being unraveled. Pluto may be too small and elliptical in its orbit to be a planet, and Sedna orbits the sun but otherwise defies planetary behavior. As Brian Marsden at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics put it last week, “There is a lot more evidence now that it really was a mistake to call Pluto a planet.”
Astute, self-driven observers such as Herschel and McNeil are not at all amateurs in the sense of one dictionary definition of the word: “A person who is somewhat unskillful.” Rather, they are amateurs in the best sense of the word: its now-forgotten Latin root amator, meaning “lover, devoted friend, enthusiastic pursuer of an objective.”
Such amateurs will not grow irrelevant. Science advances with passion as well as craft. And as any university astronomer -- snowed under by the reams of data that space probes have beamed to Earth in recent years -- can attest, the universe is simply too vast to leave to professionals alone.
