Astronomers Are Trying to Salvage 100 Years of Space Photos

The history of the galaxy is currently is trapped in millions of thin glass plates stacked in forgotten storage closets at observatories around the world. No, seriously. One clumsy move and boom, there's goes the only photo of Halley's Comet from 1910, shattered to bits. This is something that keeps astronomers up at night, and so they're working to digitize the massive analog database of celestial knowledge.

Images of stars, planets, comets, and so forth captured from a century of telescoping are all stored on photographic plates, each about the size of a piece of paper. The problem is, it's expensive as hell to scan with scientific  precision hundreds of tons of glass plates, holding literally astronomical amounts of data. To fund the ambitious undertaking, astronomers at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute launched a Kickstarter campaign yesterday. The cosmic historians at PARI hope to raise $67,000 to digitize the 220,000 plates in the observatory’s archive.

Astronomers aren't just looking to back up the unfortunately fragile, sole record of much of the universe. They're especially interested in the new discoveries to be made by getting a big-picture look at the history of the sky, and its tiny changes over the years. Many of the plates also include insightful metadata—handwritten of course, in notebooks or on the glass itself.

Scientists have been collecting and storing the old-timey negatives since the 1850s—when a telescope captured the first image of a star—and up until the mid-1980s when the digital camera came along. A typical plate contains images of 50,000 stars.

"These are beautiful images," Pisgah's Michael Castelaz says in the Kickstarter pitch video. "The art is there. The science is there. You can look at one of these images and be almost immediately inspired to write a sci-fi novel."

The observatory's Astronomical Photographic Data Archive is home to about a fifth of the photographic plates in North America. Another half a million or so plates are currently stacked up in Boston, at the Harvard College Observatory. Harvard’s "Observatory Hill" is home to the most ambitious plate digitization project to date, started five years ago with seed funding from the National Science Foundation.

That project, called Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard or DASH, has preserved over 57,000 plates and counting—so only 10 percent of the way there, but they’ve already made some galactic discoveries from the salvaged data. Scientists released the first set of data online in May, and the second set earlier this month. So if you want to travel down the rabbit hole of research studies and astronomical images, you can now indulge that urge. DASH’s ambitious goal is to scan the remaining petabyte of data within three years.

Over at Pisgah, the campaign’s plan is to start with a collection of 14,500 plates from between 1942 and 1992, which researchers say contain exotic sightings like carbon stars and quasars. At the rate of 500 plates a week, they predict they can by done by August of next year.

Combine that with the steady slog at Harvard, and we’ve got just another million or so to go.