The Effects of Digitalization on Professional and Amateur Astronomy Considered Through the Categories of Identity and Attachment

Applying the notion of identity, the article analyses the role of real time observation of professional and amateur astronomers in the context of ongoing digitalization of research. Unveiling the importance of materiality and immediate relationships with instruments, we took a critical stance to the established research approaches to this subject, in particular the ethnography of profession and the actor-network theory (ANT). Bearing on of Julian Orr studies of professional culture and our own ANT notion of ‘heterogeneous coupling', an attempt was made to introduce a new language for analysing the two knowledge communities, based on the sociology of taste and attachment of Antoine Hennion and sociology of regimes of worth of Luck Boltanski, which allows to grasp both similarities and differences in the astronomers' identities.