Let's talk of amateurs
A fruitful collaboration

by A. Carusi * - Copyright Tumbling Stone 2002
 version
The NEO (dict.) search is one of the few fields of science where non-professional people have an important role. This is certainly due to the accessibility of basic astronomic instrumentation, but also to the passion and dedicatedness of amateurs. It must also be understood that the term "non-professional" refers often only to the fact that these people, that I want to call colleagues, have a working activity different from astronomical research; however, their competence and skillness are quite often comparable, and even superior, to those of many professional astronomers.
The role of amateurs in the NEO field has been invaluable, up to now. They have contributed substantially both to discovery and to follow-up. This latter activity, in particular, has been precious, notwithstanding the fact that followup does not provide discovery rights, one of the main drivers of comet and asteroid hunters.
It is possible that, in a not too distant future, the search for NEOs will count on sophisticated instrumentation that may make very difficult the contribution of amateurs. However, I think that many of them are already well equiped, both in terms of instruments and of competence, to continue to collaborate fruitfully with the professionals.
The whole community must be very grateful to these dedicated persons and Tumbling Stone wants to pay a tribute to them starting in this issue a series of reports on amateur groups and individuals around the world.

Andrea Carusi (*) - President of the Spaceguard Foundation

 

The meeting in Italy on the contribution of non professional astronomers: an interview with Claudio Lopresti
Stars lovers

by Nanni Riccobono - Copyright Tumbling Stone 2002

On April 6° it took place in Erba, close to the city of Como, in Italy, a very important meeting between professional and non professional astronomers, to discuss the contribution of the latter to astronomy. It was organized by SAIt (Italian astronomical society) with its non professional department GAD (Digital Astronomy Group, and the UAI. We have talked with one of the organizer, founder of GAD, very well known amateur in Italy, Claudio Lopresti.

Claudio, the non professional astronomers like you has intervened on many astronomical fields since a long time. Can you talk about specific contribution in the asteroids and NEOs research?

Well, we are active from the first step - the discovery of new asteroids - to confirmation task and many others. Many of us are also engaged in developing a better knowledge of the orbits, and in astrometry. But maybe what is our specific task here is the follow up of a newly discovered object. As soon as we get communication of such a body, we start following it to furnish astronomers new observations useful to determine the orbit, and so discover if it's a potentially hazardous object or not. I guess our studies here are quite important for NEOs research because, after the very detailed scan made by LINEAR the very important thing is the follow up by many observers. About comets, research department of IAU is studying new photometric standard, and new photometry techniques to CCD (dict.) analysis, and to measure magnitude and so forth. We study the activity of the nuclei and nuclear jets and the tail morphology with a software that we have developed at GAD.

You are GAD coordinator. What is it precisely and how does it work?

GAD was born at the beginning of the Nineties, when in the field of non professional astronomy we were still very back behind with the CCD new device. It was a very fascinating device and we succeed putting together people around something that was still quite a mystery. CCD permitted to many amateurs to do something it was considered a dream. We are quite well off now, we organized nine national meeting and the tenth has to be held next October.

What GAD deals with?

Many things. We have people producing new software to analyse the images, both for Window and Linux. Just an example: Astroart, made by GAD operators in the observatory of Cavezzo, it's one of the more sophisticated image device. We have analysts and operators building CCD cameras and electronic camera systems. What is really important is we have photometry research programs for asteroids and supernovae that had given important results so far.

There are many amateurs also in IAU. What are your tasks there?

There are ten research departments where we are active in IAU: many are for cultural and divulgate purposes, many are instead for research purposes, like the meteoroids section, studying the special density of meteoroids and many other things. Section Asteroids is for astrometry, visual photometry, CCD astrometry and so forth (see T.S. number 5 about observational techniques).

Which discovery you are particularly proud of?

Just to mention a few of the important results we had lately, we can speak of the discovery of a very far away Supernovae (here in Italy we have the record: we discovered the most remote supernovae never found by amateurs); three novae in Andromeda Galaxy and hundreds little asteroids. But we should not forget the production of very accurate light curves of variable sources, the software, the analysis of the data….

In Italy there are many non professional organizations. How come?

Yes, there are many people and groups of people that is very difficult to catalogue and stereotype, because people here take part to several projects at the same time, maybe with different responsibilities and roles. Many amateurs find themselves perfectly fit with the professionals and vice versa, actually.

What is that came out from the meeting in Erba?

I made there several proposals to go ahead from the meeting toward a better organized relationship between amateurs and professionals, and I am now happy to say that they have been all accepted. We need to meet regularly, say, every six months, and we need to study the universe of amatorial astronomy. My other proposal was about a huge common manifestation to reach out not only people in the field, but also regular people. We need to take the culture of astronomy out of institutions and try to improve the scientific culture of this country. I am particularly glad of the new phase that started in Erba. A phase of collaboration and mutual help that could lead us very much ahead.

 

Links (in ):

GAD Gruppo Astronomia Digitale - http://digilander.iol.it/clop33/gad/
Societa' Astronomica Italiana - http://www.sait.it/
UAI Unione Astrofili Italiani - http://www.uai.it/
Gruppo Italiano Astrometristi GIA - http://www.giaweb.it/

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Image above: logos from GAD, UAI, GIA e Associazione Astronomica Tuscolana