Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems XXXIV

DASCH: Bringing 100+ Years of Photographic Data into the 21st Century and Beyond

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.

Peter K. G. Williams