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Harvard Plate Stacks
The Harvard Plate Stacks, previously known as the Harvard College Observatory's Glass Plate Collection or the Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection is the largest collection of photographic glass plate negatives of the night sky in the world. The collection was created across a century by the Harvard College Observatory. Many of the people who worked in and studied the collection were a group of famous female astronomers called the Harvard Computers. It is a scientific and historical collection at the The Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Scope and Size The Harvard Plate Stacks collection consists of over 550,000 glass plate negatives of the night sky. The glass alone is estimated to weight over 165 tons and stored across three floors of a purpose built building on Observatory Hill in Cambridge, MA. The majority of the collection consists of the astronomical glass plates, with most of these being gelatin dry-plate ne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harvard College Observatory
The Harvard College Observatory (HCO) is an institution managing a complex of buildings and multiple instruments used for astronomical research by the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. It is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, and was founded in 1839. With the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, it forms part of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. HCO houses the Harvard Plate Stacks, a collection of approximately 600,000 astronomical plates taken between the mid-1880s and 1989 (with a gap from 1953–1968). This 100-year coverage is a unique resource for studying temporal variations in the universe. The Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard project scanned and 429,274 direct image plates, leaving nearly 200,000 spectra and other photographic plates yet to be digitized. In 2024, a new database, StarGlass, was created to combine the scientific data from the plates with the Plate Stack's archival holdings. History In 1839, the Ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John William Draper
John William Draper (May 5, 1811 – January 4, 1882) was an English polymath: a scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer. He is credited with pioneering portrait photography (1839–40) and producing the first detailed photograph of the moon in 1840. He was also the first president of the American Chemical Society (1876–77) and a founder of the New York University School of Medicine. One of Draper's books, the ''History of the Conflict between Religion and Science'', popularised the conflict thesis proposing intrinsic hostility in the relationship between religion and science. It was widely read and was translated into several languages. His son, Henry Draper, and his granddaughter, Antonia Maury, were astronomers. His granddaughter, Carlotta Maury (Antonia's younger sister), was a paleontologist. His eldest son, John Christopher Draper, was a chemist; and son Daniel Draper, a meteorologist. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mary Anna Draper
Mary Anna Draper, also known as Mary Anna Palmer Draper, (September 19, 1839 – December 8, 1914) was an American, known for her work with her husband, Henry Draper, with astronomical photography and research. She helped found the Mount Wilson Observatory and created an award for astronomical research, the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. Early life Mary Anna Palmer was born in 1839, in Stonington, Connecticut, to Mary Ann Suydam and Courtlandt Palmer. Her father was a merchant and real estate investor. At his death in 1874, he left her and her three brothers a large fortune. In 1867, she married Henry Draper, a physician and professor of chemistry and physiology at University of the City of New York, now New York University. Particularly interested in astronomical spectroscopy, he was also a skilled amateur astronomer. Career Draper developed an interest in astronomy from her husband and the two took the first photographs of the spectrum of a st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Huggins
Sir William Huggins (7 February 1824 – 12 May 1910) was a British astronomer best known for his pioneering work in astronomical spectroscopy together with his wife, Margaret. Biography William Huggins was born at Cornhill, Middlesex, in 1824. In 1875, he married Margaret Lindsay, daughter of John Murray of Dublin, who also had an interest in astronomy and scientific research. She encouraged her husband's photography and helped to put their research on a systematic footing. Huggins built a private observatory at 90 Upper Tulse Hill, London, from where he and his wife carried out extensive observations of the spectral emission lines and absorption lines of various celestial objects. On 29 August 1864, Huggins was the first to take the spectrum of a planetary nebula when he analysed NGC 6543. He was also the first to distinguish between nebulae and galaxies by showing that some (like the Orion Nebula) had pure emission spectra characteristic of gas, while others like ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Margaret Lindsay Huggins
Margaret Lindsay, Lady Huggins (née Murray; 14 August 1848 – 24 March 1915) was an Irish-English scientific investigator and astronomer. With her husband William Huggins she was a pioneer in the field of spectroscopy and co-wrote the ''Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra'' (1897). Family and early life Huggins was born on 14 August 1848, in Dublin, to a family of four. Her parents were Helen Lindsay and John Murray, a solicitor who attended Edinburgh Academy. Her younger brother by three years, Robert Douglas, attended Edinburgh Academy at the age of twelve, and then attended further education in Trinity College Dublin in his later years. The family home was a Georgian style townhouse, at 23 Longford Terrace in Monkstown, Dublin. Margaret's grandfather, Robert Murray, was a very important figure in her life. He was a wealthy officer at the Bank of Ireland but also enjoyed the hobby of astronomy. From a young age Margaret had a keen interest in astronomy as a result ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of America, Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by U.S. state, states that had Secession in the United States, seceded from the Union. The Origins of the American Civil War, central conflict leading to war was a dispute over whether Slavery in the United States, slavery should be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prohibited from doing so, which many believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction. Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War, Decades of controversy over slavery came to a head when Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion, won the 1860 presidential election. Seven Southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salt Print
The salt print was the dominant paper-based photographic process for producing positive prints (from negatives) from 1839 until approximately 1860. The salted paper technique was created in the mid-1830s by English scientist and inventor Henry Fox Talbot. He made what he called "sensitive paper" for "photogenic drawing" by wetting a sheet of writing paper with a weak solution of ordinary table salt (sodium chloride), blotting and drying it, then brushing one side with a strong solution of silver nitrate. This produced a tenacious coating of silver chloride in an especially light-sensitive chemical condition. The paper darkened where it was exposed to light. When the darkening was judged to be sufficient, the exposure was ended and the result was stabilized by applying a ''strong'' solution of salt, which altered the chemical balance and made the paper only slightly sensitive to additional exposure. In 1839, washing with a solution of sodium thiosulfate ("hypo") was found to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Collodion Process
The collodion process is an early photography, photographic process for the production of grayscale images. The collodion process – mostly synonymized with the term "''wet-plate process''", requires the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed, and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes, necessitating a portable darkroom for use in the field. Collodion is normally used in its wet form, but it can also be used in its dry form, at the cost of greatly increased exposure time. The increased exposure time made the dry form unsuitable for the usual portraiture work of most professional photographers of the 19th century. The use of the dry form was mostly confined to landscape photography and other special applications where exposure times sometimes longer than a half hour were tolerable. History Gustave Le Gray first theorized about the collodion process, publishing a method in 1850 that was "theoretical at best", but Frederick Scott Archer was credited wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ambrotype
The ambrotype, also known as a collodion positive in the UK, is a positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process. As a cheaper alternative to the French daguerreotype, ambrotypes came to replace them. Like a print on paper, it is viewed by reflected light. Like the daguerreotype or the prints produced by a Polaroid camera, each is a unique original that could only be duplicated by using a camera to copy it. The ambrotype was introduced in the 1850s. During the 1860s it was superseded by the tintype, a similar photograph on thin black-lacquered iron, hard to distinguish from an ambrotype if under glass. The term ''ambrotype'' comes from ''ambrotos'', "immortal", and ''typos'', "impression". Process One side of a clean glass plate was coated with a thin layer of iodized collodion, then dipped in a silver nitrate solution. The plate was exposed in the camera while still wet. Exposure times varied from five to sixty seconds or more d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daguerreotype
Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photography, photographic process, widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process. Invented by Louis Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839, the daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1856 with new, less expensive processes, such as ambrotype (collodion process), that yield more readily viewable images. There has been a revival of the daguerreotype since the late 20th century by a small number of photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes. To make the image, a daguerreotypist polished a sheet of Plating#Silver plating, silver-plated copper to a mirror finish; treated it with fumes that made its surface light-sensitive; exposure (photography), exposed it in a camera obscura, camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comet Donati
Comet Donati, or Donati's Comet, formally designated C/1858 L1 and 1858 VI, is a long-period comet named after the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Donati who first observed it on June 2, 1858. After the Great Comet of 1811, it was the most brilliant comet that appeared in the 19th century. It was also the first comet to be photographed. Discovery and observations Donati first observed the comet on 2 June from the Florence Observatory: it was initially visible as a small nebula-like object of magnitude 7 near the "head" of Leo.Stoyan, ''Atlas of Great Comets'', Cambridge University Press, 2015, p.126 By mid-August it had brightened sufficiently to be visible to the naked eye.Bortle"The Bright Comet Chronicles" Harvard University, accessed February 14, 2017 In September it passed into Ursa Major. For much of its apparition it occupied a unique position (among great comets) in the sky and was particularly well placed for Northern Hemisphere viewers. It was nearest the E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Solar Eclipse Of August 7, 1869
A total solar eclipse occurred at the Moon's Lunar node, ascending node of orbit between Saturday, August 7 and Sunday, August 8, 1869, with a Magnitude of eclipse, magnitude of 1.0551. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is larger than the Sun's, blocking all direct sunlight, turning day into darkness. Totality occurs in a narrow path across Earth's surface, with the partial solar eclipse visible over a surrounding region thousands of kilometres wide. Occurring about 1.6 days before Apsis, perigee (on August 9, 1869, at 13:20 UTC), the Moon's apparent diameter was larger. The path of totality was visible from parts of modern-day eastern Russia, Alaska, western Canada, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
