Slides From My AAS243 DASCH Presentation

2024 January 15

Here are the slides from my AAS243 presentation on DASCH. It was a five-minute oral contribution, so there are only a handful of slides, but that’s no reason not to post them. I’ve also prepared some brief instructions on how to navigate the deck in your browser.

For posterity, here’s some info about the talk:

Title: Completing the DASCH Project

Authors: PKGW on behalf of the DASCH team

Abstract: 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.

Reference: AAS243 presentation #336.07.