Telescope Data Center Harvard Plate Collection Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Scanning the Harvard University Plate Stacks

UMAX Scan of an MC plate of M44 from the Harvard Plate Stacks

We scanned Plate MC39237, an 8x10 photgraphic plate taken on the night of January 17-18, 1975, using a UMAX PowerLook 3000 scanner at 1200 bits per inch of spatial resolution and 14 bits of intensity resolution. The resulting TIFF image contained 16 bits each of R, G, and B for 11724x9435 pixels. The red scan was written into a 16-bit FITS-format image file using locally written software which used subroutines from libtiff and WCSTools. The SExtractor source extraction program was used to find positions and plate magnitudes for stars in the image, and the WCSTools imwppm program was used to fit a world coordinate system to the image using the PPM catalog.

Image with North Up, East Left

Click here to see the central square degree of M44
Click here to see the central square degree of M44 with catalog stars

image of full plate with M44 open cluster

[Plate Scanning Project]