Building a stellar time machine

Harvard researchers are building a celestial time machine that lets astronomers look back at hundreds of thousands of objects in the Earth’s skies over the past century. The effort aims to digitize 525,000 glass photographic plates taken at observing sites around the world between the 1880s and the 1980s. The collection, the largest such in the world, contains a treasure trove of largely unexamined data, according to Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy Jonathan Grindlay, who is leading the digitizing effort. read more

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