Amateur Astronomer Discovers New Nebula

pease1 writes "The BBC is reporting on an amateur astronomer in the US who has detected, using a tiny 3-inch telescope and a CCD camera, the emergence of a young star from the cocoon of gas and dust in which it was born. The discovery image is here. Within hours, some of the largest telescopes on Earth had been redirected to image the new find. If you have a larger telescope and are heading out this weekend, here is a good finder chart, as this object has been sighted visually."

Comments

It makes me wonder ...

[Glog]

... how do you even go about finding a new celestial body/galaxy? Isn't there some central database which contains all of the current known stars/galaxies/nebulae?

You can plot all of the locations on a virtual sky and start looking in the directions that have been explored the least.

Then all you have to do is get a cluster of amateur astronomers, line them up behind telescopes and voila you got yourself a mega super duper star-finding array (tm)?!

Hmm, I guess the three-dimensionality of the Universe does make it a bit hard to figure out which regions have already been explored.

Distributed All-Sky ReSurvey

[G4from128k]

This type of discovery highlights the potential value of a distributed effort to continuously resurvey the sky. If a group of amateurs agreed to take pictures of selected (preallocated) spots in the sky, and send in the pictures, then we could find the events like comets, asteroids, novae, variable stars, etc. on a more timely basis. An amateur network could even send out re-imaging instructions or multiple-telescope coverage instructions to help disambiguate faint signals or triangulate on in-system objects.

The effort could even use a SETI-like distributed process to have idle computers do the image-to-image registration and differencing needed to detect changes in the images of the sky. Each computer would have reference images of some part of the sky and send back a "hit list" of potentially interesting image elements. The hit list would drive future observations (or reobservations) and ultimately be broadcast to the professional community for more intensive study of new astonomical phenomena.