Making data from amateur astronomers scientifically useful

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

With the expansion of modern CCD cameras, amateur astronomers contribute more and more to professional scientific data analyses. Follow-up observations of asteroids are routinely performed by amateur astronomers submitting their observations to the Minor Planet Center. The visual observations of meteors from amateurs collected by the International Meteor Organisation are the used to create rate curves of meteor showers which have become the de-facto standard for further analysis. The 'lucky imaging' technique, using video cameras to 'freeze' atmospheric turbulence, has begun to yield diffraction-limited data from planets. While amateurs normally have access only to comparatively small telescopes, the strength of their observations is the potential for continuous coverage of an object. Some efforts are currently going on to support the usefulness of amateur data to professionals, see e.g. [1] and [2]. Still, in certain fields, amateur data can not yet be fully exploited as too much or wrong post-processing is performed with the data. This paper compiles potential amateur contributions to science and gives guidelines to maximize the usefulness of the obtained data. References [1] Barentsen, G., Koschny, D. (2008), The Venus ground-based image Active Archive - a database of amateur observations of Venus in ultraviolet and infrared light, Planet. Space Sci., in press. [2] Koschny, D., Mc Auliffe, J., Barentsen, G. (2007), The IMO Virtual Meteor Observatory (VMO): Architectural Design, Earth, Moon, and Planets, Vol. 102, Issue 1-4, pp. 247-252.

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