Starship Asterisk*

This thread is intended for astrophographers who have had their work appear on APOD. In particular, I am interested in astrophotographers who are not also research astronomers. My question is this: has an image by you (or by any other astrophotographer of which you are aware) that appeared on APOD ever been used for astronomical discovery? In particular, for research published in an astronomy journal. I have heard a few anecdotal stories of this happening, but I am wondering if there are cases that I don't know about. One scenario might be a deep and wide image taken by an astrophotographer that shows some aspect of a galaxy or nebula that was subsequently noted by a researcher as useful for their research.

I am interested in accumulating a few cases of these to discuss as future astronomy meetings in an attempt to show that APOD has shown some value in the citizen science realm. To contribute, please either respond to this post or send an email to "nemiroff at mtu.edu". A companion post to this for research astronomers appeared here: http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=33869 . Thanks to anyone who can contribute!

- RJN

Sim, muitas vezes.

I'm not an astrophotographer myself but is it okay if I share some examples of this happening that I know of?

Carlos Barreto wrote:Sim, muitas vezes.

Google translate tells me that "Sim, muitas vezes" means "Yes, many times" in Portuguese. If that is correct, I would be grateful if you could give examples -- and doing so in Portuguese would be OK.

starsurfer wrote:I'm not an astrophotographer myself but is it okay if I share some examples of this happening that I know of?

Yes, please do share examples, even if you were not the astrophotographer!

My December 25th 2010 image of Saturn with the big storm captured shortly after it burst into view was used in the research for a paper published in Nature on the event.