(Ahead of the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, I sent this to the early adopters who formed a core group. Among them was the AAS manager for the Amateur Affiliates outreach. I received no replies.)
One of my libertarian comrades from the seventies was an advocate for a “meta-stable society.” The organization is organic and resilient, horizontal, not vertical, more like tissues and rhizomes and less like crystals. I feel that this resonates with our desires to reach out to other AAS Amateur Affiliates to provide engagement in support and valuable service, rather than marshalling them into a single-minded lockstep.
I serve in the History of Astronomy Division of the AAS. I am also a member of the Dynamical Division. It is a cliché that those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it. I see that failure within the AAS vis-a-vis both amateurs and dynamics. You will find attached an address from Edward C. Pickering, “The Future of Astronomy,” from 1909.
“The work of the early astronomers was eminently practical, and appealed at once to everyone. This work has now been finished. We can compute the positions of the stars for years, almost for centuries, with all the accuracy needed for navigation, for determining time or for approximate boundaries of countries.”--Pickering
As a result of that broadly-shared assumption, celestial mechanics languished for 50 years. Then came the Space Race. Suddenly, orbits were important again. Then we began launching interplanetary probes. And now we have so much light-weight junk orbiting the Earth that non-gravitational physics is required to track it. That is one area where amateur observers can be valuable assets to professional astronomy.
Pickering identified three great advances in astronomy: the telescope, photography, and spectroscopy. As Rick Fienberg noted in our kick-off meeting of 16 December 2020, advances in technology brought photography and spectroscopy to amateurs. That was a motivation for the AAS to open up to us again after a generations-long estrangement.
“Photography of the heavens is one area of astronomy in which amateurs have made, and continue to make, significant contributions.” Alan Hirshfeld, Parallax, (page 273).
Pickering went on to make a general plea for generous funding of open research that would allow any and every talented astronomer – and he explicitly meant astronomers with PhDs in the field—to pursue whatever they want.
“Having thus considered, among others, some of the ways in which astronomy is not likely to be much advanced, we proceed to those which will secure the greatest scientific return for the outlay. One of the best of these is to create a fund to be used in advancing research, subject only to the condition that results of the greatest possible value to science shall be secured.” – Pickering.
That was also the motivation for Vannevar Bush to call for massive government funding of every possible scientific research program. But who decides what is worthwhile? Just as Planck was publishing, William Thomson said that all that was left for physics was to chase another decimal place. The best minds of Georg Ohm’s time considered him to be a fool. But how do you tell a genius from a crackpot. How do you know whom to fund and at what level?
My answer is to leave it to the individual. Amateurs fund their own research. We choose our own projects. We buy or build our own equipment. And we publish among ourselves on discussion boards, blogs, and chatrooms. We get our peer reviews after the fact, not as permission to proceed.
Even the so-called hobbyist periodicals—
Sky & Telescope and
Astronomy -- are generally closed to us. I understand that from their point of view. My other hobby is numismatics. I was an editor for
Coin World, a weekly publication serving 100,000 readers. Just the same as the astronomy magazines, we editors did most of the writing ourselves with occasional support from a small set of approved contributors. Honestly, amateurs do not write like professionals; and fixing their middle school essays is usually more trouble than it is worth.
But with the true amateur media—the blogs, websites, discussion boards, and video channels – our observation reports, our equipment reviews, our research notes get read. And that’s the point: the scientific method requires publishing your results. We publish in chatrooms as scientists.
All of this is to speak to the reasons why the AAS can advance its amateur affiliates by giving us space to present at conferences, either live (virtually) or in print (electronically). Those media do not require the resources in hall space or publication pages needed for traditional formats. They can be open almost without limit.