Astronomers Have Digitized 94,000 Photographic Plates of the Night sky, Going Back 129 Years

Since the early days of the internet, and even computers more generally, there has been a push to collect all of the world's information into a digital form. It makes the information more accessible to the public. Over the past few decades, specialists in various historical fields have been making slow but steady progress in using the original motto of the original search engine, "That was the motto." The Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg has created one of the largest collections of historical data in astronomy.

The earliest of these plates were made over a century ago. It doesn't seem like much, but it's useful for watching the variability in some stars.

In the 60s and 70s, the star HD49798 varied greatly. Until the plates were uploaded, no one could quantify how much it was. The variability seen in the plates is consistent with the idea that a neutron star companion was the cause.

The plates give valuable historical takes on specific stars, but they also give insight into regions of the sky that had not yet been scanned. The plates were taken in the southern hemisphere. As part of the ongoing process of uploading and standing as the other examples of the sky in the southern hemisphere, they were released a few years ago.

Some issues on the plates themselves were fixed by additional software improvements. Even though the data may have been lost, at least they arecorrected to a point where they won't screw up any data set.

We have reported before that this isn't the only effort to get old plates. One of the more prominent projects is the Digital Access to the Sky Century at Harvard. Around 400,000 plates have been digitally scanned so far, and researchers are constantly looking for more and developing better techniques to analyze them.

When all known historical astronomical plates are uploaded to the internet, there could be an end to these types of projects. The APPLAUSE team recently received requests from the Vatican observatory and the Karl Schwarzschild Observatory, which used to be the main observatory for the German Democratical Republic.

There is a chance that a novel discovery could be on the horizon. Projects such as APPLAUSE are perfect examples of how collaboration can work well. Someday, it will be possible to have all of the pre- internet astronomy data collected and searched by future generations of astronomy professionals.

You can learn more.

There is a web archive with photographic plates.

A low-cost approach to scanning historic glass plates yields an astronomer's surprise.

UT is looking for volunteers to help digitize the history of astronomy.

19th century technology is being used to time travel to the stars.