How Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos

How Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos

In early 2007, René Hudec was in Building D of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, thumbing through roomfuls of floor-to-ceiling cabinets that look more like a vast record collection than an academic archive. Each paper sleeve holds a glass plate, most of which are 8 by 10 inches, a historic photographic record of the cosmos from before the age of sophisticated digital detectors. Source

How Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos \ stacker news

Today’s observatories document every pulse and flash in the sky each night. To understand how the cosmos has changed over longer periods, scientists rely on a more tactile technology. | | | :---: | | Glass plates taken at the Armagh-Dunsink-Harvard Telescope in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1950 and 1951 were annotated by hand. | | | | :---: | | A photographic plate at the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen captures the 1919 solar eclipse that …