The ORION NEBULOSA from ma telescope (12 inch metcalf doublet in Cambridge, MASSACHUSSETS), taken on 27 JAN 1936 at 03:28 am (original GLASPLATE 05118)
During my research to find who might have had interest in taking pictures of the night to be able to study it or keep custody of it I found one of the most amazing efforts done to find and restore glass plates taken through telescopes by observatories: DASCH.
DASCH is the project to digitize the Harvard College Observatory’s Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection for scientific applications. This irreplaceable resource provides a means for systematic study of the sky on 100-year time scales.
The Harvard College Observatory's Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection (Plate Stacks) is the largest collection of its kind in the world. The core of the collection is over 550,000 glass plate negatives and spectral images, covering both the northern and southern hemispheres. The Harvard Plate Stacks make up over a century of scientific observations and represent the first full image of the visible Universe. The collection was actually created by hundreds of women, who studied and curated the Harvard Plate Stacks while making discoveries of their own.
The ORION NEBULOSA from the ma telescope (12 inch metcalf doublet in Taunton MASSACHUSSETS), taken on 5 MARCH 1908 at 01:12 am (original GLASPLATE 00496)
The ORION NEBULOSA from the ma telescope (12 inch metcalf doublet in Taunton MASSACHUSSETS), taken on 09 FEB 1910 at 03:41 am (original GLASPLATE 01010)
The ORION NEBULOSA from ma telescope (12 inch metcalf doublet in Tauton MASSACHUSSETS), taken on 24 DECEMBER 1935 at 04:21 am (original GLASPLATE 04981)
You might remember the Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, from Hipparchus Catalogue in ROOM 3. In that room I have exposed only the positive of the 1937 dated plate together with a contemporary picture of the constellation (2012).
Here I wish to show that constellation again in the “negative – positive” alternation, as used above for the Orion Nebulosa.
This is what Hipparchus described, but taken from an 8-inch Draper Doublet telescope in Cambridge, USA, on May 12th, 1937 at 05:09 am (original GLASPLATE i55323)
More than this: Thomas Burns is the curator of the collection and he comes from the Humanities and is an art historian, capable of understanding the connection between art and science.
When I met him, he understood what I wanted to do and we have been experimenting together on how to show a creative and artistic process that makes it possible for others than scientists to connect to this formidable heritage.
Below I am showing some of the experiments I have later done on the Orion Nebulosa. Playing with the digitalized negative to get a positive.
I took digitalized glass plates from different dates from one specific telescope and have developed them to discover what the telescope might have shown our own eyes if we would have looked through it to gaze at the Orion Nebulosa.
Pictures are provided with date, type of telescope and time of the night. You will find the negative on the left, and the intervention to make it positive on the right.
