The time domain is under-exploited in an astrophysical context, because the large photographic plate collections are almost never consulted by young astronomers. This is a result of lack of education of the more recent generations of astronomers, and of the deluge of terabyte-size datasets produced by new observations. Yet astronomical plates represent a unique set of resources and their quality does NOT improve with time. We point out valuable scientific projects that can be conducted with archival images and describe a first step to realize this at the Uccle Observatory, in Belgium.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0010027,
title = {Saving Astronomical Treasures},
author = {Noah Brosch and Rene Hudec and Peter Kroll and Milcho Tsvetkov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0010027},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
Contribution to the conference on New Era of Wide Field Astronomy