“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
—
Kranzberg’s
First Law
I’m a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. I spend most of my time designing and building astrophysical data systems. Underpinning this work is my preoccupation with all of the ways that computers could be revolutionizing science and society — but aren’t yet.
Contact me on Mastodon as @pkgw@mastodon.world or over email at peter@newton.cx. Find out more on my About Me page, or by subscribing to my lightweight newsletter — I use it to send out links to the posts that I write here on this website:
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Latest post:
Adventures in the HCO Logbooks
2024 September 19
The DASCH scanning project may be officially complete, but that doesn’t mean that every single plate held by the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) Plate Stacks has been digitized. As part of preparations to squeeze in a few more scans of some “odds and ends” plates, I’ve been digging into the Plate Stacks’ collection of historical observing logbooks to learn more about them. The logbooks provide a fascinating window into how cutting-edge science was performed, a hundred and twenty years ago.
Recently:
| 2024 September 4 | Sign Up for the New DASCH Email List (Maybe) |
| 2024 August 27 | Layered Metadata: Output Diffs |
| 2024 August 22 | Layered Deployment Metadata |
| 2024 August 14 | rubbl_casatables 0.8 |