[153.03] Quality of Plate Copies Digitized with a Commercially Available Scanner

AAS 205th Meeting, 9-13 January 2005
Session 153 Computation, Data Handling, Image Analysis
Poster, Thursday, January 13, 2005, 9:20am-4:00pm, Exhibit Hall

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[153.03] Quality of Plate Copies Digitized with a Commercially Available Scanner

V. Strelnitski, A. Davis (Maria Mitchell Obs.)

Digitization of all the (ca. 8,000) 8"x10" plates of the Maria Mitchell Observatory's plate collection with the commercially available scanner AgfaScan T5000 took about 1.5 years. Scanning these plates with the same nominal resolution (10-20 microns) using one of the best astronomical digital microdensitometers would be about 8 times longer, and, correspondingly, 8 times more expensive. Such a fast job may raise doubts in the quality of the scans. We show, by comparison with the control scans obtained with the STScI's GAMMA laser microdensitometer, that the additional random errors for stellar photometry introduced by AgfaScan T5000 are, typically, less than 0.05 mag, and that this scanner does not produce any detectable additional astrometric errors. This project was supported by the NSF/REU grant AST-0354056 and the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: vladimir@mmo.org

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