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

A great idea.

[niktemadur]

If they manage to standarize a century of these plates, it would significantly extend the time range of data to digitally extrapolate and detect objects previously missed. Just to speak of mapping our own cosmic backyard, a significant amount of slow moving, previously undetected Kuiper Belt Objects, for example, would more easily pop into view. Surely a bunch of comets, too.

Clyde Tombaugh captured Pluto several times during his three decades long hunt for the elusive Planet X, but failed to put the pieces together. If he had had digital technology, he would have shaved off at least a decade of effort. So imagine all the extremely useful raw data still stored in those plates.