Open problems in astronomy that an amateur (with a PhD in some other field) would have a chance of solving? What are some open problems in astronomy that an amateur would have a chance of solving? Suppose the amateur has a PhD in some other field, owns a basic telescope, a set of filters, diffraction gratings, cameras, and happens to know a lot about machine learning, signal processing, spectral estimation, statistics &amp; design of experiments, and basic physics and chemistry.

Are there better tags available (such as "research")?
If you have good knowledge of software development and pattern recognition, there are several problems that you could assist in solving. Much of observational astronomy requires long time series data, and removing the noise from this data. I have just left the field where some colleagues are trying to develop some software to use image subtraction techniques to isolate individual stars in the centre of clusters. The centre of the cluster is typically more dense and harder to get clear measurements of each individual star to analyse.

Pattern recognition would be particularly useful in pipeline analysis, where a generic pipeline is used on large amounts of data to 1: find the types of stars one is interested in; and 2: extracting some interesting information on these stars. Machine learning techniques could also be used to assist in developing the general pipelines for more specific interests.

I am happy to put you in touch with a few people that could provide you with some specific problems that you might be able to assist in.