November Meeting with Josh Grindlay

Friday, November 5, 2010, 7:30 pm

Seagrave Memorial Observatory

Josh Grindlay

Running the 100y DASCH: Back to the Future for Time Domain Astronomy

Over the past five years we have designed, built, tested and now begun to operate a very high speed astronomical plate scanner to initiate DASCH: Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard. Our goal is digitize and put on line the ~550,000 glass plates of the Harvard College Observatory collection, the world’s largest and most complete (full sky) coverage of repeated images of the sky from c. 1880 - 1985 (with some gaps). With generous support from the National Science Foundation, we have built the scanner and now have developed a high speed processing Pipeline for accurate astrometry (~1arcsec) and photometry (~0.1mag) and high speed storage and access of the data in a MySQL database. Other steps need to be done to begin “production scanning” of up to 400 plates per day, which would allow the full project to be completed in 3-4 years. We are seeking volunteers to help with the scanning and plate processing. I will describe the overall project and how it fits in to the emerging field of “Time Domain Astronomy” as well as some of our early results.