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I just found out that there is an effort to digitize over 500,000 astronomical image plates spanning over 100 years.
“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.
If these guys can get the money they need to scan these plates, one of the things that become possible is the creation of movies showing, for example, the expansion of a supernova and other transient phenomena that have very long timescales compared to our lifetime.
“Nobody has ever systematically looked at the sky on 100-year time scales,” said Josh Grindlay, the Harvard astronomer in charge of the project. “There is this whole dimension that hasn’t been explored.”
These data were collected from around 1889 up until the 1980′s and once completed, the digitized data would provide us with a new dimension, namely time, through which we can infer more knowledge about cosmic events.
Usually things happen over too long of a timescale for us to really see what’s going on in the universe (in ‘real time’, that is, we can infer what’s going on in a variety of ways).
One human life span just isn’t long enough to actually watch a transient cosmic event, an a supernova, accretion of matter into a black hole, or the rotation of a galaxy occur. It’s like watching a thunderstorm develop, you can sort of notice it changing and forming if you stand out there long enough, but taking a time lapse is when you REALLY see the changes.
This dataset is a time lapse of the entire night sky since the 1880′s.
That’s what makes this project so important. Digitizing these plates will allow everyone to look at our universe over the whole period humanity has been recording it.
Granted, we have data and drawings of some isolated celestial events and objects from Kepler, Brahe, Galileo, et.al., and they have been priceless. This record, however, includes the ENTIRE sky in BOTH hemispheres. Further, the scanning can be calibrated such that the numbers in the images have scientific units and can be plotted and compared with modern measurements.
That’s unprecedented and is the astronomical equivalent of the Library of Alexandria.
This effort must be allowed to continue, I urge all of you to offer any support or encouragement that you can.
“I hate to sound crass, but if somebody doesn’t give us the five or six million, we’re kind of in trouble,” Dr. Grindlay said. “This is just the scale where all we need is the right Harvard donor. This would be the modern version of the Henry Draper Catalogue.”
If there are any millionaires reading this, here’s your chance to become famous:
“Somebody could easily put their name on this — the world’s first time-domain catalog,” Dr. Grindlay added. “Do we really want to wait another hundred years to find out with modern instrumentation what the cosmic movie looks like? We’ve got this chance right here.”
Image Credit: wikipedia
Technorati Tags: astronomy education, astrophotography, data analysis, harvard plates, harvard’s cosmos, history of astronomy
