As technology progresses through time, several parts of the history are buried deep in the past. But, with a new initiative called "Astronomy Rewind", old space photos will be restored.
According to an article in Physics, the Astronomy Rewind project is a new citizen-science initiative which will save different space images from the past and will be restored and filed for future reference. This project was launched on March 22 and aims to file all space images retrieved from old journals and researchers which will be filed in a digital database. Representatives from the project also imparted that with this effort, anyone from the worldwide web can have access to the files.
Alyssa Goodman, co-founder of the Astronomy Rewind and an astrophysicist from Harvard University, imparted that their team's inspiration in coming up with the project is giving access to the public. Goodman also added that turning these historical footages into something that's searchable is a good move to make astronomy more known to the laymen.
As published in their official website, Astronomy Rewind has volunteers who look through several scanned pages from journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) from the 19th century to the mid-1990s. Some of the photos which will be featured in the database of the Astronomy Rewind shall include celestial objects with or without coordinates and even their respective maps used a long time ago.
Representatives from the Astronomy Rewind project also shared that their initiative will be very helpful as they will be using metadata to sort and store the images from the old journals. This can contribute into a more organized system and it will also pave way for an easier mode of retrieval.
The founders of Astronomy Rewind hopes that they will attract a lot of citizen scientists who will render their time to help them out in processing the old space photos. They actually recognize the power of crowdsourcing and how it can be used in mainstreaming several causes even including astronomy.
