What About the Pro-Am Collaboration?

Amateur astronomy is a wide community. Hence centers of interest and fields of activity are numerous, from the observation, to telescope manufacturing or astrophotography. A feature of the community is that it always had too advanced amateurs who are striving to perform a science-level work, as they may, further, work together with professional astronomers. Binaries or variable stars observation are good examples of such fields. Time passing, old fields of such works may tend to dim, as new ones are appearing. New tools like CCD imaging, software photometry, or amateur spectroscopy are opening new fields of activity for the amateur astronomers. Photometry seems the highest field of such an activity for amateurs: Centaurs, eclipsing binaries, active galaxies, exoplanets transits are the object of the studies. Sky surveys in such or such emission line, or spectroscopy of stars, planetary nebulae or planets may be interesting too. An example of equipment to allow the light-curve of transiting exoplanets is a 14-inch SCT, a CCD camera and a light-curve generator software. Several initiatives already exist to foster the pro-am colloboration. A good starting point for the quest of such initiatives may be at Sky & Telescope/SkyTonight.com