Since it is not obvious from the title, clarifying that this is astronomy related. Some more context:<p><i>Nine point sources appeared within half an hour on a region within ∼ 10 arcmin of a red-sensitive photographic plate taken in April 1950 as part of the historic Palomar Sky Survey.</i>
May I suggest a video titled "Over 700 Stars Mysteriously Vanished In The Last 70 Years, But Why?" by Anton Petrov? (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3xddkS4H80">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3xddkS4H80</a>)
I don’t really know anything about astronomy but it is an interesting read. They are really hitting these old photos with a ton of brainpower. There seems to be quite a well developed science around the use of old photos and the things that can contaminate them.<p>It is interesting because the folks who made these photos in the 50’s were themselves scientists and existed in a society different from but of course pretty close to our own. I wonder if they thought of these photos as a record for posterity, or just an incidental work-product (I guess at least a little bit of the former, because some effort has been put into preserving them). I wonder what they imagined we’d do with them. I wonder what they’ll do with our ancillary work-product in 70 years.<p>It is pretty funny that we’ve got this giant worldwide network, and it is probably easier for us to combine observations from their datasets than it even was for them. They’d have to at least walk down the hallway if they wanted to borrow a “good” copy photo from a colleague.
"The glass cover during the plate scanning process is a possible source of contamination."<p>"The best way to exclude the possibility of contamination causing the simultaneous transients is by examining the original photographic plates with a microscope11. Unfortunately, we have no access to the original POSS-I plates."<p>Was a bit surprised that they have produced this detailed article describing all possible sources they could come up with, and got it published in Nature but didn't check the originals..
April 12th is also the anniversary of Yuri's night (1961) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri%27s_Night" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri%27s_Night</a>