Article Abstracts | March 2007
The complete article appears in the March 2007 issue of Photonics Spectra. If you do not have a copy of this issue,
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Digitizing a Century of Astronomical Images
A high-speed scanner is being used to create a digital database of more than
500,000 glass photonegatives.
by Thomas L. Vogelsong and David W. Gardner, Salvador Imaging Inc., Robert J. Simcoe,
Harvard College Observatory, and Jonathan E. Grindlay, Harvard University
From the early 1880s to the late 1980s, observers from Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., took more than 500,000 astronomical images of the night sky from Harvard telescopes around the world. Most of that collection is stored at Harvard in the form of 8 × 10-in. glass photonegatives.
The plate collection represents at least 25 percent of the total cataloged and stored astrophotographs in the world and is by far the largest collection of its type. It contains, for example, a photo taken of Halley’s Comet in 1910 (Figure 1). However, in its current analog form, the collection is underutilized as a research database because modern computerized analysis tools cannot be used to examine it...
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