drphilmarshall
commented
10 years ago Thanks for this suggestion, @tom6740. I went back and looked at the citizen-led enquiry section: we have a selection of projects with a range of degrees of professional guidance, but not so much on individual efforts. I think that's because we are interested in how the former might expand in the future, as we seek to gain more and more from the cognitive surplus. Can you tell us your real name for the acknowledgements, please? Thanks!
Yeqzids
Very interesting paper, thank you!
I just would like to highlight a small subset of the citizen astronomer population but probably worth to mention: citizen-guided projects and citizen-lead papers. I know the authors have a dedicated section on citizen-lead enquiries (p. 37 on the Sep 15 version), but to my understanding it is still more about professional-guided projects.
Perhaps I can start with myself as an example. Before entering an astronomy grad program, I was doing my undergrad in another area, but I realized doing astronomy and research was fun (I have been a long time amateur astronomer myself). So with some helps and hints from professionals, I initiated my own small project, got some time on a telescope, wrote a paper, and it eventually made its way to AJ. (later the paper probably help me into the grad program, but that's another story.) I know a few others who are also citizen astronomers by their own and have led papers on journals like MNRAS, sometimes as a solo author (e.g. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013MNRAS.436.1564H http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014MNRAS.439.3712L).
I am a grad student right now, but I still spend times on non-thesis projects that caught my interests. I am not sure if I can still be counted as citizen astronomer though... but I still hang out with my amateur friends, collaborate on projects, and encourage them to initiate projects and write papers if they have interests.