Folks are discovering wonderful new things in the night sky by re-examining old photographic plates, historic astrophotos taken around the world and housed now at Harvard. At the July 13th meeting of the Gloucester Area Astronomy Club we will have Ed Los speaking to us about the Harvard photographic negative glass-plate archive, and the ongoing project of scanning some 500,000 plates into a database so people can examine them without having to go to Cambridge.
Ed's presentation will cover the project itself as well as some of the historic and ongoing astronomical discoveries associated with the creation and re-examination of these photographic plates
Ed is one of the folks spearheading the effort to digitize the collection, and was instrumental in designing the software for the scanner. The Harvard collection is one of the largest and earliest glass plate astrophoto collections in the world, with photos of the night sky going all the way back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This talk is a great look back at astronomy history and not to be missed.