Onward and Backward

Back in the days of my youth, optical astronomy was done with telescopes, and the sky recorded on dry glass plates.  Starting in the 1890s, millions of glass plates were viewed, then stored in archives of the world.  They’ve been largely ignored in the years since— there are so many, where do you start?  Yet it’s a scientific archive filled with undiscovered treasures.But lately a team from the University of Chicago and and the Kavali Institute has been scanning and digitizing the old plates, u...