Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard

[1] The digital images will contribute to time domain astronomy, providing over a hundred years of data that may be compared to current observations.

Over half a million glass photographic plates are stored in the observatory archives providing a unique resource to astronomers.

Grindlay encouraged Alison Doane, then curator of the archive, to explore digitizing the collection with a commercial image scanner.

Working with Jessica Mink, an archivist of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Grindlay and Doane determined that a commercial scanner could produce suitable digital images but also found that such machines were too slow.

[5] Doane presented a talk about the problem at a meeting of the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston whose clubhouse is located on the grounds of MIT's Haystack Observatory.

That data describes what part of the sky and what objects were recorded on each plate along with date, time, telescope, and other pertinent information.

A new plate loader control system was designed and built by Bob Simcoe allowing scanning to resume in November 2014.

[10] The DASCH will not generally accept special requests for scanning a particular part of the sky from the collection so that the digitization progresses efficiently.

The DASCH team did accommodate two special requests to image plates that were not part of the Harvard collection "for scientifically compelling reasons".

[7] The New Horizons team requested images of Pluto in order to improve the dwarf planet's ephemeris that was needed to plan precise adjustments to the spacecraft's trajectory.

[7] Forty-two plates of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant taken by the Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory from 1951 to 1989 were imaged to support a study comparing x-ray and visual emissions.