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Hi All,
Just thought I'd share some good fortune I had recently. One of the rarer perks of working in a physics department is that once every now and then, *someone A* has a clear out of *some stuff* which, while old hat for said *someone A*, is really rather interesting for *large subset of people B* . In this instance, about 2000 - 3000 so called 'brightness map' astronomical photographs are being given away. These are, I suppose, the equivalent of a cartographer taking images from a plane for future reference. More specifically, they are brightness reference images, taken with specific wavelength bandpass filters, of the night sky that astronomers and astrophysicists can later refer to for brightness and positional information about a given body/target under research.
These have now all been digitised, and as such, the original plates are no longer required. Most are being given away to artists and other interested parties, but I seized the chance to have a nose through and take some interesting ones. Most are just a pattern of tiny dots (the distant stars and galaxies in that specific sector (field of view) that are too far away to resolve detail for), but others contain detailed images of galaxies and nebulae.
My plan is to take the 12 or so that I have chosen and scan them in so that, at the very least, you guys might be interested (seeing as they were taken on film.... HUGE bits of film) in seeing them. I also don't want to deface the film sheets themselves, so I'll need to come up with an imaginative way to scan them. Anyway, for now I've only got this phone photo of a whole sheet against my monitors with notepad up as a white background, but it gives you an idea of the scale. I'll try and post up relevant information in future as well.
Just thought I'd share some good fortune I had recently. One of the rarer perks of working in a physics department is that once every now and then, *someone A* has a clear out of *some stuff* which, while old hat for said *someone A*, is really rather interesting for *large subset of people B* . In this instance, about 2000 - 3000 so called 'brightness map' astronomical photographs are being given away. These are, I suppose, the equivalent of a cartographer taking images from a plane for future reference. More specifically, they are brightness reference images, taken with specific wavelength bandpass filters, of the night sky that astronomers and astrophysicists can later refer to for brightness and positional information about a given body/target under research.
These have now all been digitised, and as such, the original plates are no longer required. Most are being given away to artists and other interested parties, but I seized the chance to have a nose through and take some interesting ones. Most are just a pattern of tiny dots (the distant stars and galaxies in that specific sector (field of view) that are too far away to resolve detail for), but others contain detailed images of galaxies and nebulae.
My plan is to take the 12 or so that I have chosen and scan them in so that, at the very least, you guys might be interested (seeing as they were taken on film.... HUGE bits of film) in seeing them. I also don't want to deface the film sheets themselves, so I'll need to come up with an imaginative way to scan them. Anyway, for now I've only got this phone photo of a whole sheet against my monitors with notepad up as a white background, but it gives you an idea of the scale. I'll try and post up relevant information in future as well.
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