Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2020

54 his own eyes the photons emitted by the won- ders of the cosmos. Still, now he preferred to observe the light emitted by the pixels of an image created starting from the electric charges accumulated by an integrated circuit! The possibility of rivaling professional as- tronomers, at least in terms of images, was real but ephemeral because right in that period the gap between the two worlds became irre- versibly unbridgeable. Although many years later (in our present) “Citizen Science” would bring amateurs and professionals closer to- gether, the role of the former in the discovery of new celestial objects and the study of those already known would remain marginal. The “culture” of appearing Astronomy magazines have significantly bene- fited from the success of CCD astrophotography. Filling the pages became easier and cost noth- ing; it was sufficient to satisfy the vanity of the authors of the images. Also, to sell more CCD cameras, manufacturers and retailers bought new advertising space in those same magazines. Even, in 1994, an ad hoc magazine was created for the population of digital astrophotogra- phers. Still, it lasted only 2-3 years, like the “ca- reer” of many CCD owners who entered the world of amateur astronomy in those years. Making readers protagonists by dedicating more and more space to their images, the tech- niques used to obtain them and the CCD cam- eras offered by the market might have seemed like a winning strategy. In reality, this was the first step towards the end of traditional astron- omy magazines. Historical readers, those fond of and accustomed to contents of a certain level, recognized themselves less and less in those magazines, which instead began to appeal to new generations of occasional readers often in- terested in purchasing only the releases that contained their images and their name. While the publishers gloated, taking advan- tage of the desire for self-promotion of some of their readers, an infinitely more lethal threat (this too widely underestimated) was emerging on the horizon: the Internet. In the second half of the 90s, this revolutionary instrument irre- sistibly attracted amateur astronomers (and not just them).