"A new citizen-science project will rescue tens of thousands of potentially valuable cosmic images that are mostly dead to science and bring them fully back to life. Called Astronomy Rewind, the effort, which launches today (22 March 2017), will take photographs, radio maps, and other telescopic images that have been scanned from the pages of dusty old journals and place them in context in digital sky atlases and catalogs. Anyone will then be able to find them online and compare them with modern electronic data from ground- and space-based telescopes, making possible new studies of short- and long-term changes in the heavens."
“There’s no telling what discoveries await,” says Alyssa Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, CfA), one of the project’s founders. “Turning historical scientific literature into searchable, retrievable data is like turning the key to a treasure chest.”
- AAS Press Release: https://aas.org/media/press-releases/astronomy-rewind
- CFA Press Release: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2017-11
- Zooniverse Project website: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/astronomy-rewind
- Citizen scientists to rescue 150 years of cosmic images, Nature. 24 March 2017
- Astronomy Rewind sifts through old pictures to find new cosmic perspectives, GeekWire, March 23, 2017