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A century's worth of glass astronomical photo plates to be digitized!
This is a very cool project. If I won a lottery I'd gladly give them money for this!
For most of the history of astronomy from when photography came around up to and including today, glass plates and film have been used to record observations. Pluto was discovered by using a device called a blink comparator where you mount two glass plates taken of the same star field a few months (or years) apart, look through one eyepiece, and press a button. Every time you press it, it flips a mirror between the plates. If you see any movemement, it might be a planet. Black & white photography is a great way to do this: you develop the film, and the bright things that you shot are black, so it's quite easy to see what represents stars and what is just empty space.
(the blink comparator, the Pluto plates, and the telescope used by Clyde Tombaugh are on display at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ)
This project is especially cool because it includes sky surveys from both the northern and southern hemispheres for over a century!
The collection weighs 165 TONS and contains more than a petabyte of data (a petabyte is the next increment above terabyte which is the increment above gigabyte). And it's an original with no backups. I hope they get fundage soon!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/11/217218 It's really amazing how they're going about doing this, I would love to see the camera and software that they're using! And I think Russet worked at the observatory mentioned in the article, but I'm not sure.
(try http:/www.bugmenot.com for an already registered free NYT login)
For most of the history of astronomy from when photography came around up to and including today, glass plates and film have been used to record observations. Pluto was discovered by using a device called a blink comparator where you mount two glass plates taken of the same star field a few months (or years) apart, look through one eyepiece, and press a button. Every time you press it, it flips a mirror between the plates. If you see any movemement, it might be a planet. Black & white photography is a great way to do this: you develop the film, and the bright things that you shot are black, so it's quite easy to see what represents stars and what is just empty space.
(the blink comparator, the Pluto plates, and the telescope used by Clyde Tombaugh are on display at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ)
This project is especially cool because it includes sky surveys from both the northern and southern hemispheres for over a century!
The collection weighs 165 TONS and contains more than a petabyte of data (a petabyte is the next increment above terabyte which is the increment above gigabyte). And it's an original with no backups. I hope they get fundage soon!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/11/217218 It's really amazing how they're going about doing this, I would love to see the camera and software that they're using! And I think Russet worked at the observatory mentioned in the article, but I'm not sure.
(try http:/www.bugmenot.com for an already registered free NYT login)
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