Talk:Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard

A fact from Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 11 December 2014 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that over half a million glass photographic plates of the night sky are being scanned by the Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard project?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2014/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard.

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Updates and expansion[edit]

Because the DASCH project is ongoing, this article needs frequent updates as new blocks of images are released. Progress is not likely to follow a regular schedule due to funding issues, volunteer labor and the one-of-a-kind custom scanner. If you read this, please check project websites for newly released data and update the article as needed. If you have the time and inclination, please help expand the article.

Much more can and should be written about the DASCH project. A machine was created to automatically clean the plates without damaging the emulsion. Techniques were developed to correlate data. More background could be written about how the plates were created, either in this article or the Harvard College Observatory article or, ideally, both. I envision at least three more sections or subsections to cover:

Software development and innovation that enhances magnitude data and that registers the images with the astronomical World Coordinate System (WCS). Separate software work was needed to control the scanner.
Funding and support that includes a not just grants from National Science Foundation but lots of volunteer work by amateur astronomers. Much of the work on the scanner was done by students at a technical university. Several commercial companies donated parts, material and expertise.
The future or another section under the "Other activities" section to describe digitizing other astronomical images. Harvard holds a variety of historically important astronomical images including some of the oldest surviving astronomical daguerreotype and photographic plates and photographs. Although not of any significant scientific value, they are of historical value. These are mentioned briefly in some of the references with the obvious intent that they be digitized after the scientifically valuable plate digitization is completed if there is a way to do that.

A lot more was written about the DASCH project in reliable sources. I opened but didn't use:

Recording A Century of Night Skies Through A Scanner Darkly by Rebecca Boyle, Popular Science, 2011.11.02
Plate Tech Tonic: World's Largest Collection of Astronomical Photographic Plates Is (Slowly) Going Digital, by John Matson, Scientific American, September 29, 2010

and

Press coverage from the DASCH website is incomplete but lists more source material that I didn't use.

This article was started because I wanted information about DASCH and discovered that Wikipedia didn't have an article. Since I was searching anyway, I banged the basic article together in a few of days. I hope that editors who know more about astrophotography will help expand and polish the article. If not, I will try to do so in the future after completing some other neglected Wikipedia project. Thanks in advance, DocTree (ʞlɐʇ·ʇuoɔ) WER 01:16, 14 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]