Digitizing 100 Years of Astronomical Data

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.

Backup?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, as long as they can keep mildew at bay, odds are that the plates will long outlast any digital record. Of course it always makes sense to keep a backup, not to mention the value of an instantly-retrievable library.

Re:Backup?

[TheSHAD0W]

How about we make a backup of the backup on glass plates...

Ack! Put down that knife!

A great idea.

[niktemadur]

If they manage to standarize a century of these plates, it would significantly extend the time range of data to digitally extrapolate and detect objects previously missed. Just to speak of mapping our own cosmic backyard, a significant amount of slow moving, previously undetected Kuiper Belt Objects, for example, would more easily pop into view. Surely a bunch of comets, too.

Clyde Tombaugh captured Pluto several times during his three decades long hunt for the elusive Planet X, but failed to put the pieces together. If he had had digital technology, he would have shaved off at least a decade of effort. So imagine all the extremely useful raw data still stored in those plates.

Re:Glass plates will outlive the digital"backup"

[profplump]

And your photographic copy would A) degrade over time and B) lose quality with each copy. IMHO that's not a very good archive. Moreover, in order to slow the inevitable decay that comes with time and reactive chemicals on paper/plastic/metal/whatever, you'd still need a climate-controlled facility. And you'd still need a team of operators to make the copy, and to make later copies as the earlier ones degrade. And more than anything else, you'd need someplace to store *another* 165 tons of photos, which is certainly larger than the space required to store a petabyte of data in a modern digital format.

I'm not really seeing how your photographic archive saves money. I'm not convinced it would produce better longevity either. You might get better longevity for a single copy than with digital data, but it's a whole lot cheaper to make digital copy #2 than to make photographic copy #2.

If you're worried about file formats you could simply leave a printed text detailing the data format. Then anyone with the ability to read the media would be able to recreate viewing software, even if none existed for then-modern computers.

If you're worried about being able to read the media then you're really worried about ongoing funding -- someone to continue preserving the archive in the future. That's a problem that exists regardless of the format of the archive; if someone decided they didn't want to keep paying for 3 floors of a building, or to continue making copies of the photographic archive, you'd still be in trouble.

Re:Harvard can handle the burden

[moosesocks]

They might, but I doubt it. Unless they could potentially turn it into a media blitz, I genuinely doubt that Harvard (or any private institution for that matter) would pick up this sort of project.

If they did, they'd keep it private, and only share it amongst other institutions "prestigious" enough to be deserving of the blood and sweat of Harvard scientists.

I'm sorry, but the Ivy League has quickly degenerated into a billionaire's playground. If they turn away thousands of "perfectly qualified" applicants per year, and have all this money lying around, there are very few legitimate reasons not to capitalize on this, build up their capacity, and start being equitable about who gets to study/work there.

The Ivy League has become a game of prestige, and nothing more. I don't trust them with vital bits of science that could potentially go toward the public good. They've tarnished the name of academia.

Re:Luckily glass isn't a liquid....

[ajs]

Glass *is* a liquid (sort of) [wikipedia.org], but it does not flow, which is what I think you were getting at.