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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.
165 tons of glass plates?
Sounds like a typical lunch clean-up after Rosie O'Donnel.
Sorry. I'm truly sorry.
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I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
That's about 6e6 Bytes per gram. Digitizing that data means lots of redundancy while preserving the total mass of this collection.
Google provides views of the Earth, Moon and Mars, why not stars? If the information was made available for them to deliver to their users, they might be interested.
This seems like a great opportunity for either corporate sponsorship, or a grass-roots donation drive. In all honesty, $5 million isn't a whole lot of money for the likes of any real corporation, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to raise it through small donations from individuals. Espectially if you could ascribe names to some or all of it. How would it feel to be able to personally identify which plates you paid to have scanned? (this image of the Crab Nebula brought to you by John Smith) I'm surprised Paul Allen or Richard Branson aren't all over this like stink on shit.
I'm sure that a company like google would be MORE than willing to fund a project archiving these. The positive press, proliferation of their intended "do no evil/good guy/just another bunch of geeks" image, having their name on a major scientific project would easily be worth the investment.
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Of course, as long as they can keep mildew at bay, odds are that the plates will long outlast any digital record. Of course it always makes sense to keep a backup, not to mention the value of an instantly-retrievable library.
for Google. Man if I had a spare 5 million I'd be all over that, I love data.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Glass photographic plates, especially from silver emulsion, are analog at extremely fine granularity. Effectively molecular, depending on how flat the glass surface was settled from its molten liquid state. The features of its silver oxide crystals, laid in place by individual photons arriving from vastly distant stars, could be meaningful at less than a nanometer. Especially when measuring extremely subtle influences, like the gravity from one distant star bending the light of another distant star, measured across a century in which those stars lost gravitational mass, for comparison.
There is a practically infinite amount of data on each of those plates, limited by our precision in measuring them. It's a smaller degree of infinity than that of the sky. But the original infinite sky is lost. While the plates' lesser infinities are impossible to replace, and all we'll get to use to look back across all the billions of years we saw in a long century of them.
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a thousand minibuses full of magtape.
Those plates as well as being old and delicate contain a LOT more information then a piece of paper. Considering that something less then 1/4 the size of the period on the end of the sentence is important your scanning at a much higher resolution.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
You only saved $5 million? Are you on dialup or something?
That's what she said!
Google might do it just because it would be un-evil, and worth quite a few brownie points with scientists around the globe, not to mention that it would be cool archive to search.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
> I spearheaded a "digital backup" of around 90 filing cabinets of papers ...
> It took 2 years and way WAY WAY less than $5,000,000 to do it
500,000 plates. Over 2 years, assuming 50 wks/yr means just 5000 plates need be scanned per week. 1000 plates per day. 125 plates per hour. And this is large, fragile glass with really high data density, so you have to be a) careful in handling and b) use slow high-res scanning.
Let's take a guess that it takes only 10 minutes per plate (to fetch, tag, load, scan, and return). So we need only 20 people to scan 125 plates/hour.
Well, assume 20 scanning people and 1 IT guy handling the sysadmin work for the petabyte storage. Also one scientist/manager. Take a low intern/grad student $35k, 1 sysadmin at $65k, 1 PM/sci at $85K. All x2.5 for overhead, for 2 years. That's $4.25 mil in salaries.
There's also buying a redundant petabyte and all the necessary gear. I'm amazed they figure $5mil can do it.
A.
Maybe we'll get some data on possibly extra solarplanets from this?
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The storage hardware wouldn't need to be stored onsite - all they would need is a high-speed data connection through a fibre-optic link wired up to the optical scanner. For redundancy, you would want the digital backup stored somewhere else
as well as onsite.
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When I completed my Astronomy masters access to publicly available data from various sources (most notably NASA data made free to the public) was a real boon. It meant we could do analysis on actual real data instead of artificial or sanitized textbook material. A couple of the students built on this to do some original research. (Sadly that's not the way I went, as my time was more limited).
There are also lots of amateurs out there running a wide variety of very specialized packages to do everything from discovering asteroids to keeping tabs on the brightness of stars and watching for supernovae.
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So why not sig your all important link?
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haha, man, I run into people like you and wonder "Have people always been unable to think."
You are comparing 90 filing cabnets of paper to this.
The fact that A the paper isn't at all the fragile B it's not nearly as much data, 3 that they need special scanners? The they would need at least 5 people to do this? Probable 9 since you are going to want to have people whose only job it is to move the plates.
I wonder what you thin the true cost of the work you mentioned was?
I would guess it at about 200K, for your puny scanning job. This job is easily 25 time more complex then what your company did.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
From here: http://www.hno.harvard.edu/guide/finance/index.htm l,
This:
Harvard University's endowment, valued at $25.9 billion at the end of FY 2005, is a collection of more than 10,800 separate funds established over the years to provide scholarships; to maintain libraries, museums, and other collections; to support teaching and research activities; and to provide ongoing support for a wide variety of other activities. The great majority of these funds carry some type of restriction.
I think they can scare up the change.
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that would be awesome...
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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.
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Well, they could work on a cost-recovery basis at first, and prioritize 'client' files on demand, adding them to the master DB as they go. If two or more universities want the same palte or same series of plates, they can form an alliance to split the cost. That way, high demand or high interest plates are scanned first, and losses are minimized. That's not unlike what they've done for GIS datasets in many places for instance, and governments are often the largest single client so far as I know.
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In addition to the other points made, remember that the plates are fundamentally analog. Last year's memos, even if they are typewritten, are discrete. A smudge that makes a letter hard to read hardly matters, but it could be the one item you are looking for on the plates, irretrievably lost.
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Luckily glass isn't a liquid so they won't distort.
No sig today...
Holy crap dude, you just won the asshat of the year prize. Do you have any idea of the magnitude, delicacy, or importance of the data you're talking about? To say nothing of the needed precision when scanning.
"I scanzord 90 filing cabinets of paper into teh computerz"
You know what, I used to launch model rockets. Its really easy to make stuff go up. Just buy the kit, attach a little engine and off it goes. $30 easy! Freakin NASA I bet they're spending all of our tax dollars on pr0n.
"cheapish 20megapixel camera" - Ever hear of the Hubble? I hear people like it for more than those weird nebulae pictures. I guess we should have just given one of those astronuts a Nikkon and let him go to town. Much cheaper.
And I guess we should use lossy compression, its just empty space out there right? I bet we could get the infinite sky down to a couple hundred GB. (JPEG, its for astronomy too!)
that's astronomical!
There is more to this than simply scanning a flat image. The emulsion on these plates is a three dimensional medium, and different data can be extracted depending on your focal depth into the the emulsion. I believe David Malin did much pioneering work on this kind of thing, including the use of different layers for unsharp masking.
There will be information in the plates that is not yet part of human knowledge, and a simple scan of one focal plane is not going to get it all.
Certainly it is worth taking backup images of these plates in any way we know how, but we should remain aware that, as of today, no technology exists that will make exact duplicates of them, so great care should always be taken to preserve the originals.
Microfiche has a short life span. When I was working at the Royal Greenwich Observatory they'd done some research and discounted that as a feasible option. Something like 25 years if you're lucky? The glass plates in the RGO were from the same period as these American ones, and in equally reasonable condition (in most cases.... the problem was there as well... we were transferring them to acid free paper sleeves).
That answer astounded me as in our own project the point was to make the data public as efficiently as possible. I mean, their funding is public, so why not their data ? I can understand holding onto it until you have a paper published, but after than it should be required in the funding statement. I don't know if this is typical of the field of astronomy, but I've searched high-res sky images in the past without finding anything systematic except some specific projects such the Sloan Sky survey (which are just coordinates) or the odd marketing Hubble shot.
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In fact, they should put them in Picasa and let Google store them.
>>coat.
You need specialized scanning machines for astronomy. Office equipment doesn't do the job.
My colleagues in the UK had such a scanner. It was ~7 tonnes of metal, glass and electronics (heavy so as to be very stable), lived in its own building and needed several clever people to keep it running. Building one of these (or cloning one you already have so as to work faster) could cost a big chunk of the $5M.
The scanner I knew took ~ 30 minutes to scan a plate. For the harvard collection, choose between one scanner (which they may not have; otherwise why did they wait until now to start the project?) and a long project with big sallary bill, or multiple scanners, at extra capital cost, and less money for people.
Seriously, let Google index not only that collection, but any stellar image information and launch GoogleSky.
What's in a sig?
Step 1: Ask 15 to 20 major companies to each sponsor a "scanning trailer". They'd get their name and logo all over it and be part of the on-going story and never-ending literature, etc.
Step 2: Build-out a tractor trailer per sponsor to include everything needed to do scanning of archived materials (books, papers, photos, glass photo plates, etc.). Power source, scanners (many per trailer), etc.
Step 3: Drive the swarm of scanning trucks to the parking lots of an archive in need of backup.
Step 4: Connect the truck's network output to the archive's network to store the scanned data.
Step 5: Get local volunteers to work with the "full-time professional" in each truck to retreive (a little at a time), scan, and return the materials to the archive.
The plan would be to drive this swarm around the country, full time, and do this kind of work whereever it is needed.
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Cost of storage? Free!!! They should get a few gmail accounts and store the scans there. Occasionally mail them between accounts for redundancy. 8-)
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Not sure what's meant exactly by it being the "only collection to cover both hemispheres". The Digitized Sky Survey covers the whole sky and it's been online for 12 years.
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I don't think it would be hard to find some company to pay $5m, if they could keep the rights to the images, and pull a Westlaw type of scam. I am sure Harvard-Smithsonian isn't going to fall for this. They want to keep these images for the public, which makes it difficult for anyone to build a business model on and therefore difficult to get funding for. How would Google make money on this? Google adwords for a particular star? Or perhaps on google maps - "coffee near Barnard's star"? I am not saying that Google won't do this, just that it's not as simple of a decision for them as you might think. There's really no way to prove it's value to Google stockholders.
I am sure that the glass plates aren't going to be thrown away when this is done. They'll just be moved away from the very expensive Cambridge real estate on which they currently sit, and the space will be reused for storing more astronomers.
If that's all you found, you didn't look hard enough. Sloan serves imaging and spectral data, and all of Hubble's science data (for example) has been available from three different data centers since 1992. (This is data we're talking about, not pretty pictures.) In fact, all NASA-funded missions are required to archive their data, and NSF is (finally) getting into the act. I don't know what ESA requires, but I know they're building a large archive. And just about every large ground-based project in development has a significant archival component.
I'd say your previous employer's attitude ("our funding, our data") is the exception nowadays. Even privately funded projects are looking at archives, if only to connect to the VO.
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If you were a professional astronomer I'd say it sounds like you'd be better off finding a different organization to work for.
Try looking at cited sources on published papers for starters. http://arxiv.org/ will give you plenty of pre-publications. Here too http://sesame.stsci.edu/library.html
I'm well out of touch but here's what you get just from Google:
Skyview is a must. Images in any wavelength (multiple instruments)
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Learn about the FITS data format. Not just pretty pictures by any means.
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Chandra data
http://cxc.harvard.edu/cda/public.html
You want Hubble data? (and software to process it)
http://archive.stsci.edu/
More software to process astro data:
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/
SOHO use to publish their images in real time and if you want data...and apparently still do.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/data.html
There's lots more out there if you look at the major space instrument's web pages. I'm sure some of it is paid and a lot of it is held back for a year or so, but there's a LOT out there.
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