AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS HELP DISCOVER NEW COMETS

Amateur astronomers around the world can now receive monetary compensation for their comet discoveries, thanks to the annual Edgar Wilson Award, announced this June by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

The $20,000 award arose from the donation of a late Kentucky entrepreneur named Edgar Wilson, who sought to encourage public appreciation of astronomy.

The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT), a division of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) based in Paris, France and operated through the SAO, officially authorizes and names all new comets.

Candidates for the Edgar Wilson Award must receive the sanction of the CBAT before qualifying for the award. The monetary award is then divided equally among all candidates who discover new comets that year.

Amateurs who observe new comets from 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on June 10, 1998 on must contact the CBAT about their discovery and ascertain that they located the comet in an amateur setting before becoming eligible for the award.

Amateur methods may be visual, photographic or electronic, and equipment should be nonprofessional and privately owned.

Information on how to contact the CBAT is on the World Wide Web at http://cfa.www.harvard.edu/iau/Comet-Discovery.html.

Despite the award's establishment, experts say the chances for amateur discoveries remain low.

"Professionals have increased their searches very dramatically in recent years, not specifically for comets but for asteroids," says CBAT Director Brain G. Marsden. "Several comets have shown up in their searches, making it harder for amateurs to claim original discoveries for themselves."

Nevertheless, two amateur astronomers, one from Australia and the other from Arizona, have already managed to detect new comets, he says.

Peter F. Williams of Heathcote, New South Wales, Australia, located Comet 1998 P1 (Williams) by telescope on August 10, the first clear night after days of torrential downpour and strong winds that had kept the sky clouded and unobservable.

Although Williams has seen various stars and comets over more than thirty years of involvement in astronomy, Comet 1998 P1 is the first comet he has discovered.

"Luck certainly played its part as I was in no way conducting a systematic search for comets," Williams says. "However, had I not made the effort to observe under full moon when most other amateur astronomers are inactive, who knows who else may have discovered this comet."

The initial circumstances under which Roy A. Tucker of Tucson, Arizona, discovered the comet LONEOS-Tucker P/1998 QP54 on September 13 seems to mirror Williams' find.

"The only thing remarkable about the discovery is that I found the comet during the very first scan of the sky the first clear night after our summer monsoons ended," Tucker says.

The comet appeared in his electronic search program for Near-Earth Objects, which regularly scans the sky.

Unbeknownst to Tucker at the time, the LONEOS program, a professional search effort at Lowell Observatory, had already sighted the comet, but the program mistook the comet for a common Main Belt asteroid.

Both Tucker and LONEOS received joint recognition for the discovery.

Tucker says he plans to use the financial award toward expanding the search capacity of his instrumentation.

According to Daniel W. E. Green, Associate Director of CBAT, Williams and Tucker are unusual in that neither had ever discovered a comet before.

"Over the last 20 years, the sky has been pretty (thoroughly) searched by amateurs," Green says. "Not a lot of comets have gone unnoticed."

"Over 95 percent of comet reports are false alarms, he adds. "Since the Edgar Wilson Award was announced, many more false alarms have come up, to the point that a quarter of reports are not worth checking out, simply because the observer will say that he saw `something streaking across the sky.'"

Still, the introduction of the award is achieving its goal of increasing interest in astronomy.

"Like most other amateur astronomers, I observe the sky for the pure love and fascination of the universe in which we live," Williams says.