AN ARMY OF CLYDE TOMBAUGHS:It may be work that is being done by amateurs, but astronomy apparently it is still a field controlled by bureaucrats.
Three Racine sophomore students were notified on Monday that a
celestial body they discovered during a science project had been
verified as an asteroid.
The students at Racine's Prairie School will be able to name the
asteroid, temporarily identified as "2008 AZ28," in about four years,
according to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., the
international authority on known objects in the solar system.
I actually wrote about this very phenomenon in An Army of Davids. Astronomical work that used to require a university is now routinely done by amateurs.
FOUR years to name a celestial body? I have heard of scientific rigor, but c'mon! That's more like scientific rigor mortis. The asteroid could have hit us by then and we wouldn't have known what to call it.....
1 comment:
High school kids doing serious astronomy. Serious climatology. Serious music. What is the world coming to!??!!
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