CITIZEN SCIENCE
Join a global effort to match Harvard computers’ observations to the collection of glass-plate photographs of the northern hemisphere night skies.e
The science of everything should be for everyone. Find out how you can help with identifying stars and bush recovery, and get an update on the butterfly project.
INSIDE A BUILDING as, old and vast as the Harvard-smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA), you can only imagine the volume of research hidden away in boxes.
A marriage of the 1839 Harvard College and 1890 Smithsonian Astrophysical observatories, at Harvard University, the centre is home to a collection of around 500,000 astronomical glass-plate photographs. Taken over the century between the 1880s and 1989, the plates are accompanied by hundreds of thousands of hand-written observations by women who became the project’s Computers.
When Nico Carver and colleagues from the CFA came across those observations in 2653 notebooks, they set to work digitising the pages and slides.
“So, we found these notebooks – they were actually a re-discovery, because they’d initially been catalogued,” Carver admits. The notebooks extend all the way back to very early sketches of Jupiter and observations done with Harvard’s renowned Great Refractor telescope – the largest in North America between 1847 and 1867.
Now, faced with the task of matching the observations to one of the 500,000 glass slides, Carver and his team knew they’d need help, and a lot of it.
“We realised very early on that we would need citizen science efforts to do this, because it’s an incredible amount of material,” he says. “It’s hundreds of thousands of pages related to 500,000 glass plate photographs.
“I think if I was just doing it eight hours a day, it would take me a lifetime to get through it!”
Thus, the citizen science project Star Notes was born. The goal is to link the notebooks to their original glass-plate photograph through the unique plate number.
“This project is a little more fun than just straight transcription, where you just have to write down literally everything,” Carver says. “People need to do a little hunting on the page, try to find the plate number and then once you find it, it’s easy to type it out and move onto the next page.”
All you need to do to participate is go online, choose an astronomer and get hunting (see Getting started on Star Notes, page 107).
The project is important in preserving the work of early 20th century Harvard Computers, many of whom made great strides in both astronomy and gender equality.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the Harvard College Observatory brought dozens of women on board to process astronomical data, paying them much less than their male counterparts. Like the “hidden women” of Australian astronomy (see page 34), their work often involved measuring the brightness, position and colour of stars. Then, they would classify the stars by comparing the photographs to known catalogues.
The Harvard Computers’ work led to many discoveries, including the Horsehead Nebula, as well as the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which is still used by astronomers today. While their work might be known, those who carried it out aren’t.
“A major impetus of Star Notes is to better recognise the work of the women… at
“The notebooks extend back to very early sketches of Jupiter and observations done with Harvard’s Great Refractor telescope”
the Harvard College Observatory by identifying the glass plates they worked on and transcribing their research notes,” explains Carver.
“What we really need is to know which pages have plate numbers so that we know who worked on which glass plate. That also allows us to tie the actual notes that they took to the glass plates. Right now, that information isn’t available.
“We also don’t know the history or even names of many of the Harvard Computers, as many are currently only identified by initials. We also hope this effort may help us discover who these women were and assist researchers in telling their stories.”
The Star Notes project also hopes to further understanding of how the Universe looked a century ago, so that we can learn more about how the study of astronomy has developed.
“By studying the notebooks, we can understand how they did this science at the time,” says Carver. “It’s really fascinating because it required really excellent eyesight – because you’re looking at stars that are really, really small on the glass plate photographs.
“They were making measurements based on these physical gauges they had called ‘flyswatters’ to try and understand and classify the stars. It’s very different from what we can do today with computers.”
In the long run, the researchers hope the results of this project, combined with others, will not only recognise the Harvard Computers for their work, but will give researchers a rare opportunity to investigate change.
“The digitised glass plates combined with the transcribed historical observations could impact our understanding of the Universe and its evolution,” says Carver.
“The observations could impact our understanding of the Universe and its evolution”