Hobbyist astronomers may be scientists without even realising 鈥� as long as they put their snaps online.
On 27 October 2007, Comet Holmes grew 10,000 times brighter in just a few hours, becoming visible to the naked eye as the dust and gas around it flared to the size of Jupiter. Amateur astronomers were watching and posted their photos online.
of Princeton University and of New York University wondered if these images might be useful to science.
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鈥淭he comet was a good candidate because its explosion and sudden brightening made it both an object of interest and bright enough that a lot of people were able to photograph it,鈥� says Lang.
Montage makers
An online search threw up almost 2500 photos. The pair then used the web tool to position each image in the sky to create a montage of the comet.
Using this and a statistical model, Lang and Hogg pieced together the path of Holmes鈥檚 orbit around the sun, without knowing where the photos were taken, or by whom.
Though 鈥渃itizen science鈥� projects such as exist, this is the first in which the contributors were unwitting.
鈥淭he particularly interesting thing about this is they have managed to take such a heterogeneous collection of data and put it together in such an elegant way,鈥� says Galaxy Zoo鈥檚 at the University of Nottingham, UK. 鈥淭he fact that you can get information like that out of such a varied dataset is exciting.鈥�
Surprise supernova
One limitation of the method is that amateur astronomers tend to take pictures with small telescopes, so will be limited to the brightest objects in the sky, which tend to be easily studied by professionals, says Bamford.
However, the method could still lead to new discoveries. 鈥淚f you have a picture of one area of the sky taken by many people over a period of time, then you could search for objects which change,鈥� he says.
鈥淧erhaps one could find unanticipated transient objects, such as supernovae or gamma ray bursts,鈥� adds of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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