Tom Puckett is an amazing guy. He has a day job, but during the unused 128 hours a week he manages to run a fairly intense astronomy program. He and a dozen volunteers have managed to discover over 57 supernovas in four years using fairly vanilla telescopes and ccd cameras. Astronomy is still a field where the amateur can make significant contributions.
http://www.cometwatch.com/search.html
Variable star observations have traditionally been a large area for amateurs to create an impact. Work by Bodhan Paczynski of Princeton and Grzegorz Pojmanski of Warsaw University have led to a very inexpensive automatated search camera. The software needs improvement, but a hundred of these would make a great impact on astronomy. Looking at what they have done it seems reasonable that a serious amateur could do the same for less than $25,000 using state of the art ccd arrays. That sounds steep, but this is a serious hobby (like boating) and there are participants who spend far more on their observatories.
http://archive.princeton.edu/~asas/
- time to make some money and move to Taos...
6:23:28 AM 
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