Digitization and Scientific Exploitation of the Italian and Vatican Astronomical Plate Archives

Abstract

There is a widespread interest to digitize the precious information contained in the astronomical plate archives, both for the preservation of their content and for fast distribution to all interested researchers in order to achieve their better scientific exploitation. This paper presents the first results of our large-scale project to digitize the archives of plates of the Italian Astronomical Observatories and of the Specola Vaticana. Similar systems, composed by commercial flat-bed retro-illuminated scanners plus dedicated personal computers and acquisition and analysis software, have been established in all participating Institutes. Ad-hoc codes have been developed to acquire the data, to test the suitablility of the machines to our scientific needs, and to reduce the digital data in order to extract the astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic content. Two more elements complete the overal project: the provision of high quality BVRI CCD sequences in selected fields with the Campo Imperatore telescopes, and the distribution of the digitized information to all interested researchers via the Web. The methods we have derived in the course of the project have been already applied successfully to plates taken by other Observatories, for instance at Byurakan and at Hamburg.