Many AAS sessions here are emphasizing temporal astronomy — the idea that the heavens are by no means as static as was once thought. Two new projects, LSST and Pan-STARRS, will exploit wide fields of view and scan vast swaths of the sky night after night in the hopes of catching variable stars, supernovae, pulsars, even the occasional killer asteroid.

While these projects look to the future, there is already a century’s worth of information at hand, waiting to be tapped. The Harvard Plate stacks contain half a million photographic plates, dating back to 1885. That’s 1.5 petabytes of data that Josh Grindlay, of Harvard Smithsonian Observatory, is eager to recover and rehabilitate in a project called DASCH. The plates, created in early, and often jungly, telescopic expeditions to both hemispheres, were brought back to the US, where ‘computers’ — small armies of women — hunched over the plates and performed the grueling task of cataloging them.

Now Grindlay wants to digitize them, and fold them into a universal coordinate system using a special software that can synchronize just about any picture of the sky to the right time or place. They have already built what he describes as the world’s fastest scanner, capable of scanning one 8 × 12 inch plate a minute. All he needs is a cool $4 million, so he can hire 10 people to do the manual feeding of the scanner. “We’re begging to be done,” he says.

He says he’s had interest from Google and Microsoft, and he is also trying to approach foundations and invidual benefactors, but so far, no one has offered the money. C’mon millionaires, cough it up: DASCH is clearly an acronym that can disappear. Would you rather have your name on a century’s worth of sky, or a yacht? Here’s an image taken in 1896 with an 8-inch telescope in Arequipa, Chile, that happened to catch an alien invader in the act.

Image: DASCH