High and low

We note some gaps in our expertise.

Our astronomer is a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society.  In a manner of speaking, this is in spite of the fact that he no longer lives in or near Seattle, and the Society is an amateur organization while he is (or has been) a professional astronomer.  We don’t look at it quite that way.  Astronomy has quite global coverage, and in fact one member of the SAS lives in Malta; modern communications allow much remote contact on every level.  And the professional/amateur distinction matters less in this science than in many others; our astronomer has always found much willing interchange on each side.

He was recently pondering what he could contribute to the SAS.  If he were living in the Puget Sound area he could attend public star parties and help with basic orientation, showing the way the sky works and describing visible phenomena.  He has also helped when questions have come up about recent research results, explaining what the science actually means and has done.  He cannot, however, help with using or choosing modern amateur telescopes.  He has never used any of the current models and is not familiar with what’s available.  Neither can he help with astro-imaging techniques, so far advanced since his school days that there is very little overlap.  So in between the Celestial Sphere and rising and setting times on one hand, and explaining the workings of General Relativity on the other, there is a gap in his current astronomical knowledge.

Of course he has done plenty of sky-imaging in his time, but it was carried out with professional telescopes, equipment and software.  No current amateur detectors (to his knowledge) use liquid nitrogen for coolant, for practical reasons, and the image reduction program he is familiar with is not something you’d try to sell to the public.  Anyway, many of the techniques have no doubt been superseded.  He sometimes suspects he is close to the position of an astronomer of a previous generation, a virtuoso with silver-gelatin glass-plate technology now only of historical interest.

But since the middle of the last century at the latest no astronomer could be assumed to be familiar with the whole continuum of knowledge and techniques.  Those working in the X-Ray field, for instance, need not have even a basic idea of how the sky works, since their observations come from orbiting satellites.  Even Earthbound radio astronomers see a very different universe from what our eyes reveal.  They wouldn’t necessarily be any help finding the Lagoon Nebula with a six-inch ‘scope.

Maybe if he moves to a place where the sky is less brilliantly illuminated than Alexandria, our astronomer will be more motivated to come up to speed with modern amateur technology.  On the other hand, he might just spend his time marveling at the night sky.