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There need to be people to actually look at all the footage. More telescopes is not really enough. And there is significant effort involved in amateur astronomy. It takes a long time to learn all the tricks to pull the data from the photos and videos, and lots of time to edit each photograph and video using the software tools available.

Besides that, there are rather a lot of objects of interest. The Herschel catalogue contains 400 objects. The NGC catalogue contains thousands. Then there's comets, asteroids, planets, the sun.

Universities really aren't well enough funded for the kind of investment that would be needed to cover everything. Given that they are already spending millions on big telescopes, that's quite clear.




Yes, note that even the amateur astronomer didn't know he had captured the footage until ten days later when he looked at it!




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