Good luck Chuck! :) After recently having completed scanning over 6,000 slides, 3,000 negatives and a bunch of prints I think I know what you're in for. As for dating pictures, I'm having to do that with a number of my astroshots. No way to accurately date most but my comet pictures have been a bit easier. For those I load the comet's elements into my planetarium software, set the software's time to a while before I think when the shot was taken and then start advancing the time until the comet's position against the background stars matches that in the picture. Not exactly fast or elegant but it's worked for the ones I've tried so far. patrick On 08 Mar 2009, at 00:37, Chuck Hards wrote:

I finally started my digital conversion project. Who knows how long this will take, but I had an hour tonight so I scanned and processed one of my shots of Hale-Bopp, taken the morning of either March 7, 8, or 9, 1997- I need to do some research to pin it down since my notations with the negatives aren't precise enough. Here is the first frame scanned, with a bit of processing:

http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1229&g2_imageViewsIndex=1

I have several frames at the same image scale from that session, and hope to stack them in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. We'll see what happens. These are 5 megapixel scans of the original 35mm negatives.

While rummaging around through the old negs, I also found some shots of Hyakutake taken from my backyard, no lie, and I'll scan the best negs of that session, as well. Also many old ATM efforts, so the coming months should see a few interesting tidbits come out from the catacombs.

On 08 Mar 2009, at 00:37, Chuck Hards wrote:

I finally started my digital conversion project.

Some are easier than others. While the telescope has been busy doing its thing tonight I've been working on IDing a few more astro pictures and came across one that ended up being pretty easy: http://users.wirelessbeehive.com/~paw/temp/Ikeya-Zhang04apr2002.jpg Seeing M-31 in the shot and figuring there can't have been that many bright comets near M-31 in recent years I just googled "Comet M31" and was right away able to determine it was Comet Ikeya-Zhang in 2002. So off to my observing log and sure enough it showed that on the evening of 4 April 2002 a bunch of us went out to the Lakeside site and I used the Schmidt camera to image Ikeya-Zhang when it was near M-31. Of corse that one was so easy I'm sure I'm going to have to pay a penalty with the next one. :) patrick