Around the world, day and night, people are observing, recording, discovering. Many of them are not paid, professional scientists; they do it as a passion, even an obsession.
These are citizen scientists, the subject of a short series of documentaries on BBC Radio 4.
A couple of centuries ago, most science was done by amateurs, often clergy or people of private means who were simply curious about the world around them.
They include now famous names such as the Rev Gilbert White who patiently recorded the natural history around his Sussex village of Selbourne, and William Herschel and his sister Caroline who painstakingly scanned the night sky discovering, among other things, the planet Uranus.
Continued...... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5328762.stm