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Without HCO Plate Digitization:

  • Astronomy will never have any functional record of the sky, 1885-1989.
  • Astronomy will not have an equivalent time frame for accrued CCD observations until 2080.
  • Other plate repositories lack the personnel and infrastructure to solve challenges of storage, web display and photometric accuracy which we have in HCO, SAO, and HUL-DRS
  • Other plate repositories are hoping that Harvard will take the lead in digitization
  • The upcoming National Virtual Observatory, which provides digital access to astronomical data, will lack its only long-term temporal record of the sky to complement the future LSST digital temporal survey.