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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harvard Plate Stacks | 3/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Plate_Stacks | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T04:38:51.318188+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Armagh-Dunsink-Harvard telescope === In 1947 through a chance meeting in the Shannon Airport with Harvard College Observatory director, Harlow Shapley, and Irish President (Taoiseach), Éamon de Valera led to the idea and further creation of the Armagh-Dunsink-Harvard telescope. Although installed and housed at Harvard's Boyden Observatory in South Africa, this was a joint endeavor with the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and the Harvard College Observatory. This was one of the earlier examples of Space diplomacy that would be spearheaded at Harvard by astronomer Bart Bok. The director of the Armagh Observatory at the time was Eric Lindsay, who not only got his PhD from Harvard in 1934, but he would meet and later marry Women Astronomical Computer, Sylvia Mussells (Sister to fellow astronomer and Harvard Plate Stacks employee Muriel Mussells Seyfert). De Valera recently pushed to create the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and its subsequent purchase of the Dunsink Observatory after Trinity College Dublin had ceased its operations a few years earlier. This cooperative agreement would be one of the rare instances where these two governments would regularly work together. The telescope was a 36—32 Baker-Schmidt telescope that received first light in October 1950. This telescope would make circular photographic plates from 1950 to 1963. The telescope would create 7,087 glass plate negatives focusing on nebulae and clusters. The majority of these plates are still house at the Plate Stacks but some plates where known to be a Dunsink Observatory in 1995 and a small deposit of plates from this telescope was sent to PARI in 2007.
=== Damons === Starting in 1961, the Harvard College Observatory would undertake its last multidecade analogue photographic survey of the night sky. First starting at Harvard's Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard, MA, then moving to Boyden in South Africa, and later Mt. John in New Zealand, and Cerro Tololo would be the site of three "patrol cameras" which were 13.9 in telescope that systematically photographed the night sky using three filters (red, yellow, blue) concurrently. This would result in the creation of 12,374 glass plate negatives covering the entire sky from 1961 to 1990. Though these 8 x 10 plates capture a wide field of view, the advances in dry plate photography allowed for the capturing of the faintest objects captured on plates in the collection.
=== Subsequent additions === In addition to the plates and different campaigns made by the Harvard College Observatory, there are other smaller but important additions to the collection of materials made by other departments at the Center for Astrophysics or other observatories. The Meteor Department at the Center for Astrophysics was first a part of the Harvard College Observatory but when Fred Whipple was named director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, he moved the department over to the Smithsonian so it could continue under his leadership. This group would create thousands of glass plate negatives as well as film exposures of the night sky, ranging in scale and scope over time. Before this department transitioned into its current iteration as the Minor Planet Center, its analogue holdings were transferred over to the Harvard Plate Stacks. This would be the most significant addition to the collection in its history, numbering near 100,000 items. During the physical reorganization of the collection space, as well as the priorities put onto the collection during the DASCH Project, the lion's share of these materials were deposited at PARI. Until both institutions complete an inventory of the collections they hold, the number of surviving items is unknown. Also in relation to the DASCH Project, the Space Telescope Science Institute transferred its holdings of various later analogue sky surveys that were digitized as part of the Digitized Sky Survey. These include the National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, European Southern Observatory SRO Sky Surveys, and the UK Schmidt Telescope Southern Survey. As of 2025, these plates are being scanned by the DASCH scanner, though at a slower rate.
== DASCH ==
The Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH) was a project that started in 2001 with the intent of digitizing the glass plates in the plate collection as well as the metadata from the logbooks that supported these plates. The final data release in 2024 contained data for 429,274 glass plates, making them accessible to the public for viewing. On December 29, 2024, DASCH's successor, StarGlass, was launched. StarGlass is hosted on the cloud and is publicly available for anyone to view, allowing searches to be done for plates worked on by a specific astronomer, plates that show specific celestial objects, and much more.
== Notable people == Williamina Fleming—First Curator of the collection and head of the department from ca. 1879 to 1911. Antonia Maury—Niece of Anna Draper and builds on Fleming's stellar classification Henrietta Swan Leavitt—Discovers the period-luminosity relation of cephids on plates of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, now known at the Leavitt Law. Annie Jump Cannon—Editor of the Draper Catalogue and named second curator 1911 but does not receive the official appointment until 1938 and retires in 1940. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin—First PhD in astronomy awarded by Radcliffe or Harvard, where she discovered that stars are made up of hydrogen and helium by analyzing spectra plates from the Draper telescope in 1925. Would be rehired as a computer assigned to Leavitt's work on the Harvard Standard Regions when she returned in 1934. Also:
Mary B. Howe Baker Priscilla Fairfield Bok Agnes Mary Hoovens Brooks A. Grace Cook Florence Cushman Elsa van Dien Mabel Abbie Gill Edith Frances Gill Margaret Harwood Dorrit Hoffleit Helen Sawyer Hogg Lillian L. Hodgdon Florence Shirley Patterson Jones Edith Jones Woodward Evelyn Leland Margaret Mayall Paris Pişmiş Martha Betz Shapley Muriel Mussells Seyfert Henrietta Hill Swope Mary Watson Whitney Sarah Frances Whiting Louisa Winlock Anna Winlock Frances Woodworth Wright Emma Vyssotsky Anne Sewell Young
== References ==
== Further reading == Sobel, Dava (2016). The glass universe: how the ladies of the Harvard Observatory took the measure of the stars. New York, New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0670016952. Von Mertens, Anna (2024). Attention is discovery: the life and legacy of astronomer Henrietta Leavitt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262049382. J. Schechner, Sara; Sliski, David (4 February 2016). "The Scientific and Historical Value of Annotations on Astronomical Photographic Plates". Journal for the History of Astronomy. 47 (1): 3–29. arXiv:1602.03475. Bibcode:2016JHA....47....3S. doi:10.1177/0021828615624094. eISSN 1753-8556. Zrull, Lindsay Smith (1 May 2021). "Women in Glass: Women at the Harvard Observatory during the Era of Astronomical Glass Plate Photography, 1875–1975". Journal for the History of Astronomy. 52 (2): 115–146. Bibcode:2021JHA....52..115Z. doi:10.1177/00218286211000470. Meghan, Bartels (1 February 2017). "How Harvard's vast collection of glass plates still shapes astronomy". Astronomy. Retrieved 14 May 2025.