Bring old astronomy data into the digital age

This looks useful.

Thousands of astronomy photos are mostly dead to science, and we aim to bring them fully back to life! Astronomy Rewind will take these “zombie images” — which have been scanned from the pages of dusty old journals — and make them searchable via digital sky atlases and catalogs. Anyone will then be able to find them online and compare them with electronic data from modern telescopes, making possible new studies of short- and long-term changes in the cosmos.

We’ll start simply: Your first task will be to identify what figure type(s) each journal page contains: photos of celestial objects with (or without) labeled axes? maps of planetary surfaces with (or without) coordinate grids? In a subsequent step you’ll view the figures in their celestial context within WorldWide Telescope, a powerful data-visualization tool and interactive sky map. For images that don’t have labeled axes, we’ll use the Astrometry.net service to automatically determine their scale, orientation, and position on the sky.

“There’s no telling what discoveries await,” says Astronomy Rewind co-founder Alyssa Goodman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). “Turning historical scientific literature into searchable, retrievable data is like turning the key to a treasure chest.”
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/astronomy-rewind?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ARLaunch22Mar2017