Siddhartha Jain wrote:
I stay at a place (Bombay) with considerable light pollution thus
ruling out taking up any serious viewing with a telescope. Also, I
can't afford the expensive telescopes for deep space viewing or CCD
imagers for astrospectroscopy. I read a bit about radio astronomy but
it seems limited to the observing phenomenon on the earth and planets
close by. My question is how can I involve myself into amateur deep
space astronomy, either all by myself or working with a group of
amateur astronomers? I am an IT Security professional, I can program in
Perl/C, have worked as Unix administrator extensively and understand
basic trigonometry, calculus, physics and physical chemistry (although
that was ten years back but I can refresh myself again if I go thru the
books).

- Siddhartha


You could process SETI data in the background on your computer(s),
but I suspect you want to have some "hands on" contributions in
*addition* to processing SETI data.

Look at
http://www.aavso.org/
http://www.imo.net/index.html
http://www.lunar-occultations.com/iota/iotandx.htm

to get some ideas. You might also consider development of astronomical
education materials.

Regards,
-Sam