Is The Astronomy Hobby Dying?

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Apropos our continuing fascination with our own demise (or lack thereof):



The S&T experience accords well with much of what Don says about changing metrics, and older revenue models waning faster than new revenue models wax.

Of course, unlike letters bearing stamps, the sun still arrives every morning, and the stars still follow every night.

Some hobbies have all of the luck.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

NYT using the same old tired 1970s pre-internet metrics of shrinking hard copy publication subscriptions. But I do agree that people are dropping costly, non-environmentally friendly hard copy magazine subscriptions.

In my opinion home astronomy has never been better (with new optics and cameras) and far more attainable (with cheaper equipment) than in the past; at my house it is still going strong.
Don

I almost majored in Astronomy, but I was too far along in my Computer Science curriculum, when I discovered that I liked it, to change.

I do recall the excitement around the space program in the 60s, 70s and into the 80s.

If there is any decline in amateur astronomy these days, and I say "if" ... I wonder if the lesser emphasis on Space exploration over the last couple decades might have had an effect.

Other than that, I agree that it does seem to mirror a lot of what has happened in the stamp world with regard to print media, and so on.

To be fair to The Paper of Record, their article was about S&T being swamped by the abject failure of their corporate mega-parent, despite their own pretty good financial health ... and not the health of any hobby.

I was the one who looked at the circulation data et al, and wondered if the folks who spend a lot of time star-gazing also spend a lot of time navel-gazing about The Future of The(ir) Hobby.

Amateur astronomy has suffered from ever-spreading light pollution at the same time that the auto-locaters and auto-trackers have made the actual observations easier than ever.

My then-local astronomy club set up a public viewing area for the cross-solar transit of Venus; dozens of innocent civilians showed-up to look at the event projected onto the pavement, and to take turns at direct observation thru ?two heavily-filtered telescopes.

/s/ ikeyPikey (who has owned both a long-tube LLBean standing-tripod-style telescope and a compact Celestron desktop telescope, the latter for capturing high-speed video of ballistic events)

I grew up with the Sunday Times being an Event each week. Spreading it out all over the floor, I enjoyed many hours immersed in its pages. But today, I would not spend a dime for a copy. Funny how Times change.
Don

I drop print magazines because I have no time to read them or because I'm no longer interested in them. I do not drop them because they are not environmentally friendly. I suspect that's the norm. And I prefer print reading to online reading by a wide margin. For example, I never read Linn's online, even though it's available to me, but I always read the print version. The same goes for most of my other publications which I rarely read online.

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There was a guy who would set up every Sunday morning, in the cellar, outside the management office of our 9-building ~1100-unit complex.

He had several enormous stacks of newspapers, mostly the Sunday NY Times.

As soon as I was old enough - which was not very old - I'd be sent downstairs with a quarter to buy the paper.

My mother & father would sit up in bed, my older sister & brother would join them, and the inches-thick 'paper' would be parceled-out. And swapped 'round ... 'cept to me, as I was too young to read.

On the way to the newspaper guy, I'd pass the milk machine (25c per cardboard container of milk, chocolate milk, or orange juice). Ah, city life!

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Greetings all! I'm a professional astronomer (university faculty), and I believe the amateur astronomy hobby to be in excellent health. But the readership of Sky & Telescope has declined; that's true of many print periodicals. Its parent company has recently filed for bankruptcy.