Digitizing astronomical photographic plates
The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), in collaboration with Hamburger Sternwarte and Dr. Remeis-Sternwarte Bamberg, is digitizing an archive of astronomical photographic plates as a means to preserve cultural heritage. These photographic plates contain observations spanning nearly 100 years. They provide precious longterm information which can be mined by modern data extraction techniques. The project is supported by a DFG grant (German Research Funding Organisation).
The webarchive APPLAUSE (Archives of Photographic PLates for Astronomical USE), hosted by AIP, publishes with a CC0 license, thus this archive is freely accessible.
On 24.05.2015 the first Data Release was published, comprising 25,612 scans of 19,335 photographic plates from the Bamberg, Hamburg and Potsdam archives. The plates contain observations from 1909 to 1976 with and covers 98.9 percent of the sky. Using „PyPlate“, a software developed within the project, 1.66 billion objects were extracted from these plates, giving positions and uncalibrated magnitudes. More than half of these objects were identified using modern astronomical catalogs. The archive additionally provides 26,526 digitized plate covers and logbook entries from 77 logbooks. DR1 contains about half of the currently digitized photoplates.
Data Release 1 consists of 17 terabytes of data, efficiently organized by database catalogs. Not only stars, but also objects of our solar system are among the objects. Additionally, the logbook entries of e.g., temperature or humidity allow to generate time series for the different observatories.
Science contact: Dr. Harry Enke, henke@aip.de, +49 331-7499-433
The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), in collaboration with Hamburger Sternwarte and Dr. Remeis-Sternwarte Bamberg, is digitizing an archive of astronomical photographic plates as a means to preserve cultural heritage. These photographic plates contain observations spanning nearly 100 years. They provide precious longterm information which can be mined by modern data extraction techniques. The project is supported by a DFG grant (German Research Funding Organisation).
The webarchive APPLAUSE (Archives of Photographic PLates for Astronomical USE), hosted by AIP, publishes with a CC0 license, thus this archive is freely accessible.
On 24.05.2015 the first Data Release was published, comprising 25,612 scans of 19,335 photographic plates from the Bamberg, Hamburg and Potsdam archives. The plates contain observations from 1909 to 1976 with and covers 98.9 percent of the sky. Using „PyPlate“, a software developed within the project, 1.66 billion objects were extracted from these plates, giving positions and uncalibrated magnitudes. More than half of these objects were identified using modern astronomical catalogs. The archive additionally provides 26,526 digitized plate covers and logbook entries from 77 logbooks. DR1 contains about half of the currently digitized photoplates.
Data Release 1 consists of 17 terabytes of data, efficiently organized by database catalogs. Not only stars, but also objects of our solar system are among the objects. Additionally, the logbook entries of e.g., temperature or humidity allow to generate time series for the different observatories.
Science contact: Dr. Harry Enke, henke@aip.de, +49 331-7499-433
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