Podcaster: Mike Castelaz
Title: Astronomy Legacy Project
Organization: Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (www.pari.edu)
Link : Astronomical Photographic Data Archive (www.pari.edu/apda)
Description: Learn about the Astronomy Legacy Project and meet the team working on the project at the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive.
Bio: Mike Castelaz, an astronomer at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, a not for profit public foundation located at a former NASA Tracking Station in Western North Carolina, dedicated to science education, and is also an astronomical observatory and home of the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive.
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Astronomy Legacy Project. I’m Mike Castelaz, an astronomer at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, a not for profit public foundation located at a former NASA Tracking Station in Western North Carolina, dedicated to science education, and is also an astronomical observatory and home of the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive. The Astronomical Photographic Data Archive consists of more than 220,000 photographic plates and films from more than 40 institutions across the United States taken by generations of astronomers dating back to 1898.
Here’s one that I would like to show you. It’s a piece of glass, it’s thin. It was taken in 1978 on the 4-m telescope. I’m looking at the envelope here that describes all the data on this thing. If I drop this plate, it’s gone forever. The goal of the Astronomy Legacy Project is to digitize these. In essence, to make these available to you or to anybody. What we’re really doing is creating an online treasure chest of the astronomical night sky dating back more than 100 years.
Here’s just a brief look at the photographic plate I was holding up. And, I put it on a light table so we can get a closer look. You can zoom in and you can start to see the detail and the stars that are coming out of this particular image. Chances are the astronomer that studied this was interested in maybe one or two or three objects and the others have just never been looked at.
Photographic plates like the one I was holding up hold images like this, a massive cloud of gas and dust in the interstellar medium, clusters of stars surrounded by reflection nebulae, galaxies colliding, zooming in and taking deeper scans and images. We start to see regions of star formation, large fields of view looking at 50 degrees across the entire sky, note the constellations, a spectrum. These are just a few examples, of snapshots of some of the plates in the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive. Multiply this by 220,000 and you’ll see the inspiration, and the excitement, and the motivation we have for doing the Astronomy Legacy Project – for digitizing the plates, for getting them out to you. You may have seen from just these few some inspiration.
As the Director of APDA says “extraordinary photographs require extraordinary digitization.”
We now present four key team members to the Astronomy Legacy Project, each telling us about their roles. Our first team member to speak is Thurburn Barker, the Director of the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive. Thurburn will talk about the ability to use modern image processing techniques on digitized images from decades old photographic plates.
[Barker speaking] What I’m working on here are spectrums of stars, in fact a series of spectrums of a single star Eta Carinae. You can see up here there are some long narrow images. These are black and white images of the spectrum of Eta Carinae from 1972 to about, um, backward to about 1968. What I’m is comparing the changes in the spectrum, a very volatile star, and that’s what these graphs right here represent. This one represents, the bottom one here, actually this one right here, which is also on this graph over here which is calibrated in wavelength. And I can determine what elements are here by moving this line and looking at a table of elements over here. For example, this one right here is hydrogen and this little peak right here indicates that it’s is helium. And we see it over here. There are two lines, two very bright lines that are as close together as these two here, these two here, and these two here. But these are all there four year period from this one to that one. And this is what we’re interested in. These are stars changing over a very short period of time. In fact, this one in 1840 was the second brightest star in our sky. But you see it only in the southern hemisphere.
Once this data are digitized, then all this information is available to the public, researchers, scientists other than astronomers, who can then also examine it for a variety of changes of the elements that show intensity level change, and appearance of another element, especially at 4713 which is a helium line which is very much in this sort of type of star. [end Barker speaking]
Our next speaker is Christi Whitworth, the Education Director at PARI. Christi describes how digitizing astronomical photographic plates impacts science education programs she is developing.
[Whitworth speaking] Here at PARI we’re really excited about a new program called 3D Planets that’s being funded by the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Student Science Enrichment Program. And in this program, we’re going to be training students to build sections of lunar and planetary surfaces in 3D software, visual modeling software and 3D printing software. And the students are going to be using that to help museums in North Carolina have tools for visually impaired visitors.
But, we can take that same technology with the digitization of the Henize and Warner-Swasey collections, spectral sections of those collections, and use them with our SCOPE citizen science project. In SCOPE, people use the spectra of stars to classify those stars. And, at PARI we still need a way to share that idea with our visitors who have visual impairments and at outreach events across the State. And, we’re hoping that by digitizing those plates and building 3D models of those plates, we can then share this a little bit better with folks at places like the Astronomy Days at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. [end Whitworth speaking]
Our next speaker is Lamar Owen, Chief Information Officer, talking about the information technology needs for the Astronomy Legacy Project.
[Owen speaking] Storing and retrieving large quantities of astronomical data requires reliable resilient storage. Here at PARI we are leveraging donated storage from EMC Corporation to do this. Each storage unit contains 15 drives, each drive is half a terabyte in size and we have, you can see, a number of these drives. These are all donated storage. They are all fully operational. And they are ready to store astronomical data, like the 14,500 plates that we are talking about for this project. Also, we have a fiber optic network, along with donated Cisco switching gear to, ah, provide a dedicated pathways for retrieval of this information as well as, um, compute capabilities to analyze this information for scientific usage worldwide. [end Owen speaking]
Our fourth speaker is Lee Rottler, staff astronomer, who talks about the data pipeline.
[Rottler speaking] Hi, I’m Lee Rottler. I’m staff astronomer and instrument scientist here at PARI. And, I’m working with Mike and Thurburn on the Astronomy Legacy Project. I’m basically responsible for building a data pipeline which will pick up the scanned images as input and they’ll do things, the pipeline will do things like add the metadata that is required for each image, and any other processing. For instance, if we have two images of a similar area on the sky, we’ll do a mosaic of it, whatever needs to be done, I’ll be writing the pipeline software to do that.
The project, the digitization project will allow astronomers all over the world to log in here and analyze these data and lead to perhaps new discoveries, especially when they add it to satellite data that were doing it, that most of them are analyzing now.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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