BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Flood threatening historic astronomical archive

A burst water main flooded part of Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, MA. It's where a historical collection of astronomical photographs is stored. They're on glass plates and there is a project underway to digitize them. Despite their immersion, the Observatory is hopeful that they can be recovered and that the digitization will be completed almost to schedule.

Here's the whole story.

In today's day and age, it is imperative to digitize everything. I hope the glass plates will be OK. A courthouse in GA burned to the ground last year. It is terrible when history is lost.

I often wonder where we would be today if the library at Alexandria had not been destroyed so many ages ago.

I agree, Angie, I'm one of those forlorn souls that mourns the library of Alexandria. Fortunately, it looks like the photographs will be saved.

These photographic plates were catalogued, their details recorded, and the spectra of the stars identified by women "computers". Some of the best known of them were: Annie Jump Cannon who classified nearly a quarter of a million spectra for the Henry Draper Catalogue; Henrietta Leavitt who discovered something about variable stars that is still a cornerstone of cosmic distance measurements; and Williamina Fleming who discovered hundreds of stars and devised the first photographic standard to determine the apparent brightness of stars (stellar magnitude).

Edward Pickering was the director of Harvard College Observatory who hired a large number of female computers - computers were the people who did the astronomical calculations by hand. (No electronics in those days!) He was also the one who seriously introduced photography into astronomy at the observatory. We can give Pickering a good deal of the credit for the existence of the observatory's photographic archive.