The Long Tail by Chris Anderson Page A

Australia, a former amateur trying to turn professional in Chile, and professional physicists in the United States and Japan. When a scientific paper finally announced the discovery to the world, all of them shared authorship.
    Demos, a British think tank, described this in a 2004 report as a key moment in the arrival of a “Pro-Am” era, a time when professionals and amateurs work side by side: “Astronomy used to be done in ‘big science’ research institutes. Now it is also done in Pro-Am collaboratives. Many amateurs continued to work on their own and many professionals were still ensconced in their academic institutions. But global research networks sprang up, linking professionals and amateurs with shared interests in flare stars, comets and asteroids.”
    As Timothy Ferris points out in Seeing in the Dark, his history of modern amateur astronomy: “If one were to choose a date at which astronomy shifted from the old days of solitary professionals at their telescopes to a worldwide web linking professionals and amateurs…a good candidate would be the night of February 23, 1987.” Demos concludes: “Astronomy is fast becoming a science driven by a vast open-source Pro-Am movement working alongside a much smaller body of professional astronomers and astrophysicists.”
    The enabling technologies of this Pro-Am movement in astronomy are Dobsonian optics, CCDs, and the arrival of the Internet as a mechanism for sharing information. These tools have swelled the ranks of the amateur astronomers and vastly increased their impact. Over the past two decades, astronomy has become one of the most democratized fields in science, in part because it’s so clear what an important role the amateurs play.
    NASA often calls on amateurs to watch for specific asteroids that might be headed for Earth, an observation task coordinated via an email message group called the Minor Planet Mailing List that’s run by Richard Kowalski, a forty-two-year-old baggage handler at US Airways in Florida by day and an astronomer by night. Some of the eight hundred amateurs on the list record their observations for fun; others hope to be immortalized by having an important discovery named after them. What’s notable is that none of them do it for money.
    Astronomy has a natural place for volunteer manpower. Again, the problem with the sky is that you need to be looking at the right place at the right time to witness most interesting new phenomena, such as asteroids or stellar evolution. It’s less a matter of how big or expensive the telescope, and more a matter of how many eyeballs are transfixed on the sky at any given moment. Amateurs multiply the manpower of astronomy many times—and not just by looking at the stars from their backyards.
    SETI@home (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home”) is a project that harnesses the spare computing power of more than half a million home computers. After collecting hours and hours of white noise recorded from space, the project distributes its radio telescope data to the computers of volunteers. When they’re not using their computers, a special screen-saver kicks in. While it displays cosmic imagery, it scans bits of each recording in the hopes of locating a signal that may have come from alien intelligence. By divvying up its data to these volunteer computers, the project is able to examine a far greater number of signals than it would otherwise; and all anyone has to do to participate is download some software.
    Another project has open-sourced the analysis of Mars imagery.NASA put up decades-old photos snapped by the Viking orbiters and asked Web visitors to click on all the craters they could see, classifying them as fresh, degraded, or “ghost.” Usually, this is a tedious job for scientists and grad students that can take months or years, but in just three months the “Mars Clickworkers” project got volunteers to identify more than 200,000 craters. Averaged over all the