More than 30,000 celestial images that were all but lost to science are about to find their way back into researchers’ hands thanks to the efforts of thousands of citizen scientists. The photographs, radio maps, and other telescopic images were scanned from the pages of dusty old journals for a cosmic reclamation project called Astronomy Rewind. Its goal is to bring these “zombie” images back to life so that astronomers can find them online and compare them with modern electronic data from ground- and space-based telescopes, making possible new studies of short- and long-term changes in the heavens.
In its initial phase, launched in March 2017, volunteers using the Zooniverse citizen-science platform classified the scans into three broad categories: single images with coordinate axes, multiple images with such axes, and single or multiple images without such axes. During the next phase, which launches today, 9 October, visitors to Astronomy Rewind’s Zooniverse site will use the coordinate axes (when available) or any rulers, arrows, captions, or other labels to determine each image’s location on the sky, angular scale, and orientation. The images will then appear in WorldWide Telescope (WWT), a virtual sky explorer that doubles as a portal to the peer-reviewed literature and to archival images from the world’s major observatories.
Laura Trouille, co-lead for Zooniverse at the Adler Planetarium, suggests that with some 3,000 registered users (and another 1,500 or so anonymous ones) contributing to Astronomy Rewind, the roughly 10,000 images with coordinate axes should be placed into WWT within a few months — though, if history is any guide, it could be sooner. The remaining 20,000 sky views will surely take longer, as volunteers will have to do a bit of detective work to figure out exactly where the images belong on the sky.
The figure shows an image from 1905 superimposed on modern data. Maybe we'll get some more expanding nebulae time lapses out of this (http://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=134317) and more accurate proper motion measurements. And more object like Tabby's Star, perhaps.
https://aas.org/media/press-releases/astronomy-rewind-2
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