Preservation
Several institutions are setting up archives to preserve the original plates, preventing valuable historical astronomical data from being lost.
In the fall of 2007, a group of 31 international scientists gathered at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) to develop a national plan for the preservation of astronomical photographic data. They established the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive (APDA), housed at PARI and dedicated to the task of collecting, restoring, preserving and storing photographic data. APDA is also tasked with scanning each image and establishing a database of images that can be accessed via the Internet by the global community of scientists, researchers and students.
Housed in a highly secure building on the PARI campus, the APDA now has a director and a collection of more than 100,000 photographic images. The APDA also possesses two high precision glass plate scanners, GAMMA I and GAMMA II, that were built for NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The scanners were used by a team of scientists under the leadership of the late Dr. Barry Lasker to develop the Guide Star Catalog and Digitized Sky Survey projects that guide and direct the Hubble Space Telescope. EMC Corporation donated a networked storage system and software that can store and analyze more than 100 terabytes of research data.
Read more about this topic: Photographic Plate
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