Virtual astronomy is just a click away

Laughlin is no stranger to Web-based astronomy. He helped start another project in which amateurs point their telescopes at potential extrasolar planetary systems and look at dimming starlight to learn about a planet’s size and composition. Unlike Systemic, users have to buy expensive equipment — including telescopes and cameras — to participate.

Before Internet-based astronomy, it took a long time for novices to report their discoveries. High-speed, always-on Internet access has blurred the line between the professionals and amateurs, said Terry Mann, president of the Astronomical League, made up of over 240 U.S. amateur astronomy clubs.

Last year, Mann signed up to analyze a repository of online images of the first-ever microscopic grains of star dust brought back to Earth by a NASA spacecraft.

The work is painstaking. Mann and her fellow 25,000 volunteers eye hundreds of thousands of digital images in search of minuscule carrot-shaped trails left by the capture of star dust, believed to be the leftovers from stellar explosions.

Mann has submitted 40 possible examples of star dust in the images. If correct, amateurs can get their names published in scientific papers written by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, which manages the Stardust @ home project.

“Amateurs can do real science. We can actually help,” Mann said.

Andrew Westphal, associate director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley, praised amateurs — it would probably take his whole life to find all the dust sprinklings, he said.

“It’s stunning how good they are. I think they’re better at this than we are,” Westphal said.

The Internet has also benefited professional astronomers, who often have to fight for scarce telescope time at major research observatories.

Since 2001, the National Science Foundation has funded a $10 million project to create a “national virtual observatory” that compiles data from ground and space-based telescopes — including dazzling images from the Hubble Space Telescope and X-ray data from the Chandra Observatory. The project, which is still under development, is primarily used by professionals who want to go to one source to mine archival images. High school and college students are increasingly tapping into the Web site as well, said project manager Robert Hanisch of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

As far as amateur astronomer Bianco is concerned, the more people teasing out the mysteries of the cosmos, the better.

“It’s going to take some time and collective effort to find what’s out there,” he said.

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