2023 December 12
Like the title says: I’ll be attending AAS243! I’ll be in New Orleans the whole week representing DASCH and WorldWide Telescope.
I’m scheduled to give presentation #336.07 on Completing the DASCH Project at 3:10 PM on Wednesday during the “Catalogs, Surveys, and Large Programs” session. The abstract is:
DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard) is the effort to digitize the majority of the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection, a set of ~550,000 images of the night sky spanning more than a century of observations. With the support of HCO, DASCH scanning is resuming after a hiatus of more than two years. At the time of the writing of this abstract (late September, 2023), scanning is 96% complete with an estimated ~6 months required to finish. Efforts are underway to make the complete DASCH lightcurve collection available for analysis, enhancing a unique resource for time-domain astrophysics. Work is also ongoing to expose the full richness of the collection in a sophisticated web interface that will interlink the scientific data with archival and historical information, centering the “women astronomical computers” without whose work this irreplaceable scientific asset would not exist. I will report the current status of the scanning effort, DASCH data availability, and the new web portal.
I’ll also be around for the Tuesday special session “Securing Diverse Data and It's [sic] Provenance to Enhance Time Domain Astronomy”, during which Josh Grindlay will give presentation #241.02, also on DASCH.
I’ll also be busy on Sunday from 1 to 5 PM at the special session “Effective Astronomy Visualizations for Research, Outreach, and Learning”, talking about visualization and WorldWide Telescope.
Of course I’ll be at a bunch of other sessions too, but those are the main ones on my calendar right now. Hope to see you there!