Amateur Scientist

Over the morning espresso shots, we discussed what we would do if you had to spend around $10k on a science project, say from a peculiar inheritance, with the goal of achieving some conclusion, not necessarily a peer-reviewed publication, but just something you could do that goes a step beyond taking pictures of Saturn's rings, what would you do with your mini-X-prize?

One answer was to build a home-made STM, which is pretty doable given the introduction of low-cost DAQ's. Depending how good of a programmer you are, you could probably come under $1k. Personally, I'd like the idea of having a little optical lab at home; maybe toss in a Sherline mini-machine shop. Then you could make everything out of brass, and when your DIY steampunk microscope gets a million hits from Boing Boing or whatever, you could get back $20 from the Adsense revenue. Bonus!

But that's coming from a strong instrument bias. I suppose you could do a lot, say, with local wild-life tracking. When I was a kid, there was a group of us that used to go around doing water-quality testing on streams and mountain lakes. I image with a couple of $k, you could set up automatic monitoring stations.

One long term thought I had was to build an IR telescope, to try and do astronomy in cities. From what I hear, IR astronomers get instrument time on the big scopes during nights when the moon is out, so that should be workable. With the advent of compressive imaging techniques, you could replace a prohibitively expensive IR-array with a single channel detector.

So feel free to toss an idea in the bag, or more likely, not.