2024 September 26
A quick public service announcement: I’ll be attending and presenting at the ADASS 2024 (aka ADASS 34) meeting in November! I have an accepted contributed talk entitled DASCH: Bringing 100+ Years of Photographic Data into the 21st Century and Beyond.
Update (Oct. 1): The talk is currently scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 12th, at 4:15 PM local time.
The abstract is:
The Harvard College Observatory was the preeminent astronomical data center of the early 20th century: it gathered and archived an enormous collection of glass photographic plates that became, and remains, the largest in the world. For nearly twenty years DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard) has been actively digitizing this library using a one-of-a-kind plate scanner. Earlier this year, after 470,000 scans, the DASCH project finished. Now, this unique analog dataset can be integrated into 21st-century, digital analyses. The key DASCH data products include ~350 TB of plate images, ~50 TB of calibrated lightcurves, and a variety of supporting metadata and calibration outputs. Virtually every part of the sky is covered by thousands of DASCH images with a time baseline spanning more than 100 years; most stars brighter than B ~ 15 have hundreds or thousands of detections. I will present the DASCH data release and discuss some of the lessons learned while trying to make data from the previous century accessible in the next century and beyond.
This is part of the theme “Extending the life of software and data”.
I’ll be in Malta for the entire duration of the conference (November 10–14), but not much beyond; in particular, I won’t be there for the IVOA interop meeting.
Looking forward to seeing people there!