CALLING ALL AMATEURS

By Jeffrey Kluger

Early last Tuesday morning, an odd little ritual played out in dozens--perhaps even hundreds--of homes across the U.S. Rising before dawn, a lot of sleepy-eyed folks switched on their televisions to the Weather Channel, powered up their camcorders and recorded a minute of programming right off the screen. Then, with the camera still running, they went into their yards and videotaped the sky just as the star Aldebaran slipped behind the moon. Finally they came back inside, taped a bit more TV and went back to bed.

The participants in the curious exercise were neither cultists nor performance artists but astronomers--albeit amateur ones. Recruited largely via the Internet, they were helping the astronomical pros study the occultation--or eclipse--of Aldebaran, an observation that could lead to a more precise estimate of the moon's diameter. That figure in turn could serve as a cosmic yardstick by which to measure other heavenly bodies.

Not long ago, scientists would never have relied on such a ragtag band, or such low-rent equipment, to do their fieldwork. But lately that's changed. With the contraction of federal science budgets and the expansion of the World Wide Web, private research is going decidedly public. From astronomy to epidemiology to archaeology, more and more professionals are finding that when you're looking for lab assistants to collect good data at a bargain price, you can't beat the amateurs on the Internet.

"Often there just aren't enough people to gather the information you need," says Carlos Avalle, an electronics engineer based in California, who helped plan the recent occultation study. "With the right amateurs, you can get a lot of science done."

For last week's mass moon watch, the professionals needed the dilettantes badly. When Aldebaran slipped behind the moon, it never slipped completely. Rather, it just arced around a bit of horizon, seeming to flicker as it passed behind mountains and peeked over valleys. The pattern of flashes allows astronomers to trace the lunar profile, refining surveys taken by past space probes. Since observers on different parts of the earth would see the star obscured by different parts of the moon, however, the more sightings scientists collected, the more lunar real estate they would cover.

In order to muster a big enough army to conduct this work, the little-known International Occultation Timing Association issued a call on its Web page, inviting volunteers to tape the eclipse--synchronizing their recordings with the Weather Channel, whose programming appears at the same hours all over the country--and then mail the cassettes to the organization's Maryland headquarters. By the day of the event, the Website had received some 7,400 hits, and organizers hope for hundreds of recordings. "The more tapes the better, " says Avalle. "And we expect plenty."

Computer scientists benefit from vox-pop research too. In 1994, four encryption experts enlisted 600 Internet volunteers to crack a secret code protected by a software "key" 129 digits long. Its creators had estimated that it would take 40 quadrillion years to solve the puzzle; the online team did it in eight months and in the process gave software designers new insights into building better security systems. Hackers have become so adept at finding security holes in the Internet that Netscape, maker of the leading Web browser, pays a bounty for any chinks in the program's encryption armor that are reported to the company.

While the Internet may be the biggest force behind science's democratization, it's not the only one. Local health groups have long used little more than flyers and phone banks to document emerging illnesses like Lyme disease or recruit volunteers to test new AIDS medications. Archaeologists increasingly rely on the help of lay people who pay for the privilege of accompanying the scientists on digs. And even in summer, the National Audubon Society is looking forward to its Christmas bird count, a winter tradition in which thousands of volunteers survey the ornithological fauna near their homes in order to map ranges and track populations. "People want to go out and observe," says Frank Gill, the Audubon Society's science director, "but they want to contribute their observations to a larger goal."

For a few scientists, accustomed to guarding their professional turf, this kind of poaching may not always be welcome. What many are beginning to recognize, though, is that for some kinds of scientific endeavors, more isn't just better; it's the only way to get the job done.

--With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York

With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York