Astronomy Rewind Project: Aims To Restore Ancient Space Photos From Old Astronomy Journals

Astronomy Rewind employs volunteers to digitize map and to be keen on the things presented in journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) around 1850. This is with the aim to revive old images from astronomy journals through a citizen-science program that was introduced on March 22.

History has been left behind as time flies by and technology progresses. However, Astronomy Rewind proposes to gather all ancient space images from old journals, which will be stored in a digital database for future reference. According to Physics, the project is a new citizen-science drive, and its representatives also shared that the files can be accessed by anyone worldwide.

As per Alyssa Goodman, restoring historical scientific literature and making it be a retrievable data is similar to opening a treasure box. She is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“It's a great project, and essential for time-variable astronomy amongst other things,” Tim O'Brien, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, UK said.

Astronomy Rewind as revealed on its official website found images on journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) dated 19th century to the mid-1990s. According to Science Times, the collected photos include celestial objects with or without interrelate and even their corresponding maps used many years ago.

Furthermore, delegates from the Astronomy Rewind said that their project is helpful and highly relevant for the next generations. They will be utilizing metadata to categorize and save the images from the old journals. This could lead in a more systematized set up for an easier way of retrieval.

The founders of Astronomy Rewind are hoping for additional manpower to help them in transforming the old space photos. The project is hosted on the Zooniverse platform, which is a citizen-science web portal that comprises over one million volunteers.