Digitizing 100 Years of Astronomical Data

Maximum Prophet writes to mention that a collection of glass plates containing astronomical information from the late 19th century through the mid-1980s is being considered for digitization. "The accumulated result weighs heavily on its keepers on Observatory Hill, just up Garden Street from Harvard Square: more than half a million images constituting humanity's only record of a century's worth of sky. 'Besides being 25 percent of the world's total of astronomical photographic plates, this is the only collection that covers both hemispheres,' said Alison Doane, curator of a glass database occupying three floors, two of them subterranean, connected by corkscrew stairs. It weighs 165 tons and contains more than a petabyte of data. The scary thing is that there is no backup." I'm sure that anyone with a spare $5 million or so would be welcomed with open arms.

Comments

Irony

[iknownuttin]

...examined by a staff of "computers," women hired by Harvard, initially at 25 cents an hour, because they were good at math.

Who else felt the pang of irony considering what happened at Harvard last year with the then president saying something about women and science and math?

Alternate funding.

[going_the_2Rpi_way]

A simple way to fund this would be to sell the scanned plates as scientific history artifacts/souvenirs. I bet you could not only sell them to universities worldwide but also to cosmologists, scientists and astronomy fans in general.

I mean heck, $10 a plate for 500K plates gets us to $5M. I'd pay that without even knowing what I was getting. Up it to $25, $50 or $100 and I'm probably still interested.