From a post originally in sci.astro.amateur:
Harvard Observatory's project to digitize 500,000 plates from the 1890s to 1950s. This is a really well-written NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/science/10astro.html?ref=science The Havard Project Homepage for the digitization project is at: http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/plates/ Online, currently they are only providing a plate index. Only a few scanned test plates for M44 (the Beehive Cluster) in the MC series are actually online. Plug in "M44" into the search form at: http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/plates/mcsearch If the plates are digitized and placed online, amateurs could use them to look for changes in Milky Way nebular clouds over a 100 year time scale. - Kurt _______________________________________________ Sent via CSolutions - http://www.csolutions.net