“I don’t think anybody has ever made a list of what the discoveries were from the plate stacks because they were used in a lot of other ways,” said Owen Gingerich, an astronomer and historian of science at Harvard. Astronomers are still using the collection, and even finding new ways to keep it scientifically useful.

The book ends around World War II, but the collection certainly doesn’t, with plates made until 1989. The story of the people behind the plates is told beautifully in Dava Sobel’s new book The Glass Universe. The Harvard College Observatory’s collection contains more than half a million images of the stars chemically stamped onto glass rectangles, the oldest created during the 1880s.

One particular collection of astronomical images has fed the minds and calculations of scientists making some of the most important discoveries of their times. The same is true of photographs of the stars. We love photographs for the way they capture a moment, a smile, a friendship - although sometimes we don’t realize the camera’s luck for years.

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