A good cause
From
Indiegogo:
Astronomy Legacy Project
Before the invention of digital cameras in the 1990's, and for more than 120 years before that, astronomers put in several million telescope hours photographing the night sky - measuring star brightnesses, detecting comets, planets, nebulae, mapping our Galaxy, and building the foundations of our understanding of our Universe! All of this raw beauty, and secrets yet to be discovered, are held as largely unexplored photographic images on thin, fragile pieces of glass. Imagine digitizing these hundreds of thousands of photographic images with such high precision that the images appearing on your screen replicates the original. This digitization process is the heart of the Astronomy Legacy Project.
This project is based out of the amazing
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in North Carolina. The group was able to take over a major NASA tracking station
complete with instrumentation.
They are also the repository for the
Astronomical Photographic Data Archive (APDA) -- a collection of over 220,000 images that they are looking to digitize.
Go to
Indiegogo and donate some money -- this is crowdfunded science at its best.
Posted by DaveH at March 4, 2014 4:29 PM