INTRODUCTION: This is AudioExplorations, a podcast series from AccessScience, the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology Online at www.accessscience.com. I'm Jessa Forte Netting. Today Dorian Devins speaks with astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for this AudioExploration: Pluto. This segment: "Astronomy: A science of amateur experts "

DORIAN DEVINS: Some amateurs have actually made contributions, valuable contributions to the field, haven't they?

DR. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Indeed because amateurs are looking at the sky all the time, and that is total collection of world astronomers are, of amateur astronomers are monitoring the sky all the time. So they discover things. In fact many, many comets and asteroids and supernovae, these events and phenomena and objects that sort of come and go, which you're not going to find if you just sort of look at the night sky when your observing proposal is accepted. It's — amateur astronomers are out there every night, every night, to everyone else's surprise. So yes you can contribute in this way, and they do.

MS. DEVINS: This accessibility of astronomy to the non-professional or to sort of anybody who's interested in some way must help with the popularity of the science as well.

DR. TYSON: Yes, and that accessibility by the way, I think can be measured in multiple ways. One of them is the fact that there exists such a thing as amateur astronomers. But not only that, telescope ownership is actually higher than you might suspect. Curiously New York City, I’ve been told, I haven't actually verified this fact but no one else has laid claim to it, that New York City has the highest per capita ownership of telescopes of any city in the country. And what are people doing with the telescopes?

MS. DEVINS: Bird watching?

DR. TYSON: Bird, oh yeah, yeah, they're watching pigeons, I’m sure. In the park. So maybe some people are using telescopes for heavenly bodies of a different sort, but the … another factor that I think we can't take lightly is the role that NASA has played in the public appetite for cosmic discovery. The images from the Hubble telescope beamed down to earth are on practically everyone's screen saver for their computer. Posters have been made of it, and NASA is not unmindful of this public appetite and in fact a portion of its budget is allocated to public outreach, knowing that people care and people want as much as they can get. And not only that, if you look at our lexicon it’s actually quite playful, quite fun. Big red stars, those are red giants; spiral galaxies; elliptical galaxies. These are words that describe what they are without any kind of primer to try to translate jargon into regular words. The event that began the universe, "Big Bang". Regions of space we fall in and don't come out, light doesn't come out of it, "black hole". Jupiter has this big red spot in its cloud formations that's been there for 300 years, you know what we call that? Jupiter's Red Spot, okay. You know what you call spots on the sun? Sun spots. So these are all official terms and what that means is the public can walk right up, right up to the edge, at the boundary between what is known and unknown, and someone on that edge can turn around and say, "Here's what I'm studying, and here's why."

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