Re: Useful Research?

[Michael Koppelman <lolife@bitstream.net>]

On Thursday, June 6, 2002, at 08:36  AM, Martin Nicholson wrote:

> I suppose what I am saying is that collecting data without the
> supporting infrastructure to process it is not a sensible policy.

This, to me, is the power of amateurs. We should slowly assemble an army 
of CCD-equipped amateurs to do follow-up observations, period analysis, 
etc. It is a pet peeve of mine that a) so many amateurs with great gear 
spend so little time doing science and b) so many professionals still look 
down their great noses at us amateurs. Amateur astronomers are the Open 
Source to their Micro$oft. We have more resources than they do when you 
add us up collectively. Every variable star book I have, for instance, is 
full of AAVSO light curves.

I'm not really sure what your point was Martin. I'd bet a million bucks 
that some day professionals will study stars that we discover here at TASS.
  Tom has really got a great thing going here and I commend him. (I do not 
mean to imply that you were disagreeing with this last remark.)

Cheers,
Michael