Digitizing 100 Years of Astronomical Data 115
Maximum Prophet writes to mention that a collection of glass plates containing astronomical information from the late 19th century through the mid-1980s is being considered for digitization. "The accumulated result weighs heavily on its keepers on Observatory Hill, just up Garden Street from Harvard Square: more than half a million images constituting humanity's only record of a century's worth of sky. '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." I'm sure that anyone with a spare $5 million or so would be welcomed with open arms.
Glass plates will outlive the digital"backup" (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like a job for Google (Score:3, Insightful)
A Million People With $5 (Score:3, Insightful)
Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Glass plates will outlive the digital"backup" (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the ideal would be if we could develop a cheap digital permanent storage that had guaranteed physical longevity, say several millenia. That combination would allow easy dissemination of the data and safety by using a multiplicty of sources.
Re:Why does it have to cost so much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Would Google archive it, perhaps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:InfiniBytes (Score:4, Insightful)
And limited by the lenses/mirrors, and limited by atmospheric effects, and inconsistencies in the glass, and the silver, and, and....
I can't testify to the quality of the glass negatives, but I can testify to the fact that as much as people like to believe, even the best modern analog capture sources aren't anywhere near practically infinite, even in the best laboratory conditions.
Re:InfiniBytes (Score:3, Insightful)
All this stuff should be digitized and made public (Score:3, Insightful)
There are also lots of amateurs out there running a wide variety of very specialized packages to do everything from discovering asteroids to keeping tabs on the brightness of stars and watching for supernovae.
Luckily glass isn't a liquid.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why does it have to cost so much? (Score:3, Insightful)
"I scanzord 90 filing cabinets of paper into teh computerz"
You know what, I used to launch model rockets. Its really easy to make stuff go up. Just buy the kit, attach a little engine and off it goes. $30 easy! Freakin NASA I bet they're spending all of our tax dollars on pr0n.
"cheapish 20megapixel camera" - Ever hear of the Hubble? I hear people like it for more than those weird nebulae pictures. I guess we should have just given one of those astronuts a Nikkon and let him go to town. Much cheaper.
And I guess we should use lossy compression, its just empty space out there right? I bet we could get the infinite sky down to a couple hundred GB. (JPEG, its for astronomy too!)
Re:Glass plates will outlive the digital"backup" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, as a matter of fact. Definitely a lot of work is involved, but do you believe that you wouldn't need a team of document managers, millions of dollars worth of floor space, and expensive climate controlled facilities for archival of microfiche? You most certainly do. It's a lot of data. Period. No matter what you try to do with it, it's a lot of data. It's going to require a lot of resources. That's just a fact of life.
Anyway, noone in their right mind would choose microfiche for that type of data. If you're only storing plain text pages it's adequate (though I still don't think it would be the "right way to do it" in this day and age), but for photographic plates? Not going to work.
Microfiche is vastly overrated, in my opinion. My current project involves taking 2 floors worth of 30-50 year old microfiche and scanning it, OCRing it, and PDFing it. Yes it certainly does age. Quite poorly, in fact. The quality is absolutely terrible compared to the paper versions, some of it is stuck together, and indexing and cataloging it is a nightmare all of its own.
Yes, there are challenges in the digital world too, but most are easily surmountable given a little bit of common sense in understanding that digital is not magic. It doesn't mean you can "fire and forget". The documents will still require maintenance, cataloging, protection and monitoring. Format obsolescence is very nearly a nonissue, it is blown way out of proportion. That's where the "maintenance" comes in. The key benefit of digital is that you can and should losslessly upgrade your format whenever obsolescence is becoming a concern. Formats do not disappear overnight and suddenly everyone forgets what to do with them, you have plenty of time to make your transition if you're paying attention (which you must be: again, digital is not magic).
Re:InfiniBytes (Score:3, Insightful)
Due to speed considerations the grain of these plates would be much worse. But well within the resolution of the 'scope used for recording.
All that said these plates are a goldmine once digitized due to the ability to do massive searches both spatially and temporally.
Re:Glass plates will outlive the digital"backup" (Score:3, Insightful)
It's true that digitized data is more prone to failure than most analog carriers. The whole point is that digitized data is much easier copied over and over again, without loss, independent from whatever carrier used.
GoogleSky (Score:3, Insightful)