The Harvard Plate Scanning Project
by
Douglas J. Mink
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Coauthors: Alison Doane, Robert Simcoe, Jonathan Grindlay

There are over 500, 000 glass photographic plates in the Harvard Plate Stacks, exposed in both the northern and southern hemispheres between 1885 and 1993. This 100 year coverage is a unique resource for studying temporal variations in the universe. We realized that it would be even more useful if the images were all available in digital form over the Internet. We will report on progress in the design and construction of a high resolution, large field scanner, which we are building after discovering that no commercial model could adequately deal with our largest, most useful plates. In addition to plate scanning, we will report on our progress toward digitizing the catalog of plates, constructing an automatic pipeline to make the scanned images useful, and the scanning of the handwritten observing logs which provide the most complete information about the conditions under which the plates were taken.

Date received: February 18, 2005