One of the traits I have always loved about human beings is our ability to be deeply obsessed by odd things. I am consistently charmed by the devotion of ham radio operators, of people who collect thimbles with sheep on them, and of aquarium geeks. Most of us have some peculiar thing about which we care far more than we’re officially supposed to, and that brings us strange and deep pleasure, for reasons we don’t fully understand.
One of the subcommunities I particularly love are the amateur astronomers. There are thousands upon thousands of people who devote their free time and disposable income to watching the skies, and to sharing their love of astronomy with others. They throw star parties to bond with like-minded souls, they grind their own mirrors in their basements, and they set up telescopes on crowded city streets to show off the moons of Jupiter. They also do honest-to-god cutting edge science, tracking comets, monitoring variable stars, and even finding an absoluting amazing gravitational microlensing event. I sometimes feel a bit ashamed that I get to do astronomy for a living, when, while I love what I do, I don’t looooove it with the same profound depth of these folks.
Anyways, the New York Times has a great little story today about the impact of this obsession on real estate. Not only are there residential developments designed by and for amateur astronomers (no street lights here, thank you very much), but people are modifying their homes to install permanently mounted telescopes with full domes, sometimes over the objections of their local zoning boards. I’m not quite sure what it does for resale values compared to adding an extra bedroom, but I think it’s just fantastic.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
I don’t know if you intended the title to be a play on words (or a word, rather), but these guys produce the dream ‘scopes for amateurs who prefer observing the deepest, faintest parts of the cosmos.
October 5th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
When I was a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, I would set up my telescope in the driveway late at night, surreptitiously unscrewing the bulbs in the neighbor’s porch lights if they had been left on, and spend an hour or two hunting down faint-fuzzies or trying to split close doubles. Invariably, somebody walking by would stop and ask if they could take a look and, of course, I’d invite them to look at a number of interesting objects. On the evening of comet Hyakutake’s closest approach, a group of about 50 people gathered in my driveway (the neighbors, by then, referred to me as “the telescope guy”) to take a look despite the temperature that night: -37 degrees Fahrenheit.
When I retire, I hope to be able to build a little backyard observatory.
October 5th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
I sometimes feel a bit ashamed that I get to do astronomy for a living, when, while I love what I do, I don’t looooove it with the same profound depth of these folks.
Me too!
October 5th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Just to add to the list of cutting edge science that gets done by amateur astronomers is the recent (yesterday) detection of a new transiting exoplanet with an orbital period of 21.2 days, nearly four times longer than anything periously detected (see here for details http://www.oklo.org/).
October 5th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
A friend of our is building a retirement community centered around something other than a golf course — a vineyard and winery. When we first heard about it, the idea struck us as brilliant, and led to thinking about other “theme retirement communities.” This post was a “eureka!” for that train of thought: imagine 30-50 houses in the $1M range in a dark-sky location and built around a high-class facility with a couple of really good scopes and provisions for the resident’s personal equipment. Add a good restaurant and fiber-optic internet access (also to the cameras in the observatory) and I for one would have a FOR SALE sign in front of our house in a minute (yes, even in this market).
October 5th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Bob, you’re not the first to have that particular “eureka” moment: see Arizona Sky Village, Deerlick Astronomy Village, etc.
I agree that it’s cool to see people getting excited about astronomy, and I think it’s great that the cost of building a functioning observatory is now low enough that more people can participate. But I wish more of this energy would go toward helping to darken our city skies instead of just moving out away from them. My dad pointed out that dark skies used to be the domain of the poor people who lived out in the sticks, but now it’s mainly the well-to-do who can afford to live away from cities. This trend is making astronomy more accessible to some, but moving it out of reach of many others.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
I’d found Deerlick while I was writing my prior post. It didn’t seem very close to what I was thinking. The Az Sky Village is closer, but no mention of “retirement community” and I was thinking about more extensive facilities: clubhouse w/ restaurant and fitness center, BIG telescope (not that 30″ is tiny), and, unhappily, a retirement community needs to be closer to good medical facilities. Boy, they do have the dark skies, though; I’ve been in that area. It’s now on my list of possible places to retire to.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
another reason why i’m excited to participate in more public outreach and the education of science and astronomy as soon as the final rush of defending my dissertation is over!
i find it energizing to talk to people of any age about the bright objects they see in the night sky or basic astronomy concepts… both for my state of mind and my state of research! sharing a little of what i’ve spent sooooooo long in school learning is reinvigorating when i’m agonizing over a research detail….
October 6th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Here is my previous post with corrections to my mangled HTML links:
Here is some more background on the amateur astronomer contribution to gravitational microlensing observations. There is a second paper
on the microlensing event discovered by an amateur. Amateur astronomers have also helped detect an extrasolar planet with the gravitational microlensing method. It is often the case that observations at just the right time with a small telescope are critical for these discoveries. It is much easier to contribute if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, however.
October 6th, 2007 at 4:15 am
Of course if your eyesight is getting weaker because of age
you might prefer this type of ‘Retirement Home’ and Cocoon – The Return
October 6th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I suppose when you compare the price of a telescope to a jetski or ATV, one could promote the idea that, as a passionate hobby, stargazing is certainly more earth friendly and sustainable. But if you need million dollar homes to live in special neighborhoods, then these sorts of ideas become sadly elitist. People in specialized burbclaves, with their guard houses, electronic fences and security personnel tend to not be the sort that take their telescopes out into the communities to share with the riff-raff.
October 6th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Catch a Star 2008 competition
October 7th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Apologies, my perception here may be skewed. I live in the DC suburbs of Northern Virginia, out beyond Dulles, and houses in that range aren’t seen as anything special. A house that costs $1M here might well cost half or a third of that in a more normal area. I only intended to indicate the idea of a relatively upscale community, not The Mews at Windsor Heights.
Gates with guardhouses, yes, but are there really enclaves with electronic fences?
October 7th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Funny that you bring up amateur astronomy; I just started building my first telescope a month ago. I graduated from university with a minor in astronomy and was interested in it for awhile before that, but I never got around to getting my own scope. I finally got serious about it and was quite thrown off by the price of a bigger scope. Luckily, there’s a weekly telescope making workshop here in DC, so I just decided to build my own!
October 8th, 2007 at 4:39 am
One of the best “amateurs” I know, Ignacio de la Cueva. See gallery of his work here.
Amazing.
October 8th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Amateur astronomers really are some of the most terrific people. In terms of general science-literacy they are probably the tops in the nation.
What I want to know is how they can be organized into a voting bloc. According to this, there may be as many as half a million of them. Religious right, watch out! Forget bombing abortion clinics, our gang sets fire to stadium lighting systems.
Organized by a nefarious system of hardline magazines such as Sky and Telescope and Astronomy, and driven to extreme redshifts by the internet, they cast fear into the hearts of the GOP. As many as 95% believe in the “literal truth” of the big bang, while a shocking 98% consider that science should “play a larger role” in public policy.
October 8th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Gates with guardhouses, yes, but are there really enclaves with electronic fences? You ain’t been out west have ya???
Please note that i said electronic and not electric; these are two different things out here. You use electric to keep critters and unwanted elements out of gardens, or larger domestic beasts in corrals. You use electronic (with razor or barbed wires) to monitor all ingress and egress throughout the burbclaves; and electronic includes very bright street and night lighting. You do realize that there are million dollar home communities all over this nation, popping up in places like Missoula and Bozeman, Coeur D’Alene, Reno, Nevada City, etc., all place that used to have wonderful night sky viewing?
One of my academic colleagues was married to Vic Maris, who has been making telescopes in northern CA for decades. His efforts included making telescopes, and astronomical experiences (shall we still call it stargazing?), available to school kids on a regular basis. I wholeheartedly salute those sorts of direct involvements of initiating our future generations to the stars.
October 8th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
“I am consistently charmed by the devotion of ham radio operators…”
Well if you knew the magic of pulling your signal all the way to South Africa, or getting hundreds of cards in the mail, or talking to an astronaut from the International Space Station, you’d be hooked too.
-KB3HTS
October 9th, 2007 at 12:28 am
So how common is it for professional astronomers to not looooove astronomy like the amateurs do?
And: is it really true that lots of professional astronomers don’t know their constellations very well? That seems weird to me – almost like a mathematician who never wanted to learn the first 10 or 20 digits of pi. We grow out of that phase, but it’s a good phase to have had.
October 9th, 2007 at 3:02 am
Hope some of you will join our discussion group over in Yahooland called DarkSkyCommunities, linked above. A great place to continue this discussion and to work together building communities with astronomy as a major emphasis!
Thanks,
David Oesper
Moderator, DarkSkyCommunities
Dodgeville, Wisconsin
October 9th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Yvette in action
This is a very interesting hobby. I only listen to shortwave stations, trying to pick up exotic radio stations from the noise, listening to air traffic communications on the other side of the world etc.
October 9th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
John –
Many of us started as physicists. I grew up in cities all my life, and actually saw the Milky Way in 21 cm before I saw it in the optical. Also, I think many of us got into physics because we have terrible memories and like being able to derive from first principles — meaning that memorizing constellations has little appeal.
Speaking of radio, my “amateur” astronomer friend (who runs the observatory at my old high school) tells me that radio telescope kits are now becoming available. MIT’s Haystack observatory has developed one that is running $7k for the base model — http://www.haystack.mit.edu/edu/undergrad/srt/index.html
Now that is cool. You can do 21 cm from a city. When I move in to my retirement penthouse on 59th and Park (http://www.disco-disco.com/images/continental-platos.jpg), I am totally going to bribe the city to put a dish up. Or N — I could have my own VLA!
October 9th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I got to play with a Haystack SRT in my lab class, junior year. They’ve got one installed on a roof over on the east side of the MIT campus. My lab partner and I measured the Doppler shifts of the 21-cm line and confirmed that yes, the Galaxy is rotating. We also found a giant, narrow peak right in the middle of our frequency band, which never shifted and which grew stronger the closer you pointed the dish at Boston, across the river. Something in the Financial District is radiating at 21 centimeters! (I blame the Illuminati.)
October 9th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Hey Blake! I used the same dish. (Well, not sure if it’s still the same, I used it back in 1998.) Back then someone was trying to do information transmission over powerlines, and it would blast out the signal no matter where the dish was pointed — large enough fuzz that you couldn’t even measure the beam off the Sun. All totally illegal because L band is strictly protected. To tell the truth, I can’t remember if there was also a narrowband signal from the Financial district.
Nowadays, “broadband over powerlines” is the Ham radio demon, and yes, it looks like for astronomers as well. My hope is that we can lay enough fiber that it will never take off — I mean, there can’t be that much bandwidth hiding in the electrical grid?
October 9th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
not 1998, sorry, more like 1995. And looking at the Junior Lab photos online now, it’s a new dish. Jay Kirsch must be happy!
October 10th, 2007 at 7:49 am
John:
Even if your job is fascinating, it’s a rare person who can looooove a job like one loooooves a hobby or pastime. For professionals (of any type) the job comes with the usual accoutrements, like office politics, writing proposals, or knowing that when clouds come in at 3:30 am or the telescope power goes out, you still have to stay up the rest of the night in case things magically improve for the last hour – you don’t have the freedom to pack it in.
Constellations are hard. I respect people who really know the sky to the point of being able to navigate it from memory. It is much harder than memorizing pi. You also have to live in a place where you can actually go out many nights, and see a fair number of stars. The first time I can remember seeing the Milky Way clearly, I was already 15 years old.
October 13th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Only in the beginning. It’s just a matter of pattern recognition. I guess that when learning to read Chinese you’ll also face some difficulties in the beginning. But there are no patterns in the digits of pi, so I don’t see how that can be easier.