Building the Pipeline to DASCH for Temporal Surveys

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Dr. Jonathan Grindlay will continue his efforts to recover information from the pre-digital era of astronomical imaging. Under a previous award, his group has demonstrated a high speed scanner system that can quickly digitize astronomical images recorded on glass plates to high photometric accuracy. Their machine will enable the full Digital Access to a Sky Century from Harvard (DASCH) project, and makes possible the eventual digital preservation of the 500,000 plates of the Harvard College Observatory. The DASCH project will open the astronomical window of time variability on long timescales (from months to 100 years) from currently existing, but inaccessible and barely-mined data. Under this award, Dr. Grindlay will finish development of the extensive software needed to reduce and analyze DASCH data. The photometry and astrometry routines are in advanced stages of development, but further work is needed to make them fully robust. Two science projects will be carried out during this software development: temporal surveys of the galactic bulge and of a selected set of quasars. To conduct the two demonstration projects, this group will scan and digitize about 10,000 plates (2% of the total). As in previous studies of time-variability, it is expected that opening a wide window in time will reveal new phenomena. The project aims to increase public awareness that the universe is not static, and evolution and change are common. The group will also develop a public website that will be fully accessible to the public and astronomical community.