Primary Scientific Goals

The digitization of the Harvard Astronomical Plate Collection will provide the capability for systematic study the sky on 100 year time scales.

We plan to pursue the following avenues of exploration:

• Conduct the first long-term temporal variability survey on days to decades time scales
• Novae and dwarf novae distributions and populations in the Galaxy
• Black hole and neutron star X-ray binaries in outburst: constraining the BH, NS binary populations in the Galaxy
• Black hole masses of bright Qusasars from long-term variability measures to constrain their characteristic shortest timescales and thus size
• Quiescent black holes in galactic nuclei revealed by tidal disruption of a passing field star and resultant optical flare
• Unexpected classes of variables or temporal behaviour of known objects: preview of what PanSTARSS and LSST may see in much more detail but on shorter timescales)

Enabled by the DASCH scanner

Custom-designed scanner scans two 8 x 10 in plates or one 14 x 17 in plate into 11 micron pixels in only ~80 sec, which will allow ~400 plates/day so that full digitization could be finished in ~3 years when funding is available. Click here for ~2min movie (MS .wmv file) of scanner in action.

To yield lightcurves with ~0.1mag uncertainties over ~100y