Brian;
I am curious of what film was used all those years ago for professional
photos? 2415? 103a series?
Steve Coe
On Tuesday, September 13, 2016 9:15 PM, Brian Skiff <bas@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I spent the Monday and Tuesday in Tucson packing up
an archive of about 4000 8x10-inch photographic plates taken
by Elizabeth 'Pat' Roemer, who died last spring. This was
organized by Lowell librarian/archivist Lauren Amundson and
science historian Samantha Thompson, with help from Maria
Schuchardt, who manages the Space Imagery Center at the Lunar
and Planetary Lab on the UofA campus. We already have a
few thousand plates that Roemer took while she worked at
USNO-Flagstaff in the 1960s.
  The Tucson collection includes plates mainly taken with
the Steward 90-inch and Catalina 61-inch telescopes, but there
are some plates taken with the Lick 36-inch Crossley telescope,
and even a handful of plates from the Curtis Schmidt in Chile.
Roemer, who got her PhD in the 1950s at Berkeley, started at
Lick then moved to USNO-Flagstaff, and eventually to Tucson
(there was also a stint at Yerkes early on). Her specialty
was obtaining positions and confirming observations of faint
comets and near-Earth asteroids. From the late-1950s until
1981 she often obtained first recovery and/or final observations
of any visible comets and unusual asteroids. Since she had
access to telescopes far larger than usual in comet- and
asteroid-hunting, she was able to recover comets and asteroids,
and extend orbital arcs and photometric records considerably
over what was usually at the time.
  Roemer kept meticulous records (and was a proverbial
pack-rat who kept everything), so we have beautifully-penned
logbooks and samples of the astrometric reduction printouts
(we're talking line-printer printouts here). All this will
make the archiving process straightforward, and we have a
bunch of nice arty-facts for future display. There was
obviously a huge amount of time/work involved in those days.
Included in the mix is a large amount of correspondence with
various 'famous' names in the asteroid/comet world, including
George van Biesbroeck and Brian Marsden, and things such as
class notes from grad school 65 years ago --- she listed other
class members, which included folks who went on to become
well-known astronomers.
  While packing up the material I was struck by the strong
historical chain (or matrix), and her having met so many of the
characters involved in this particular enterprise. (She was
eventually president of the relevant IAU commissions, so she
knew "everybody".). Among my own tangential connection was
recalling funny stories told to me by Marsden about the summers
he spent in Flagstaff working with Roemer learning about the
practical aspects of astrometric observation and orbit calculation
while he was a Yale grad student. She was quite a remarkable
person, hinted at by this biographical sketch:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/tucson/obituary.aspx?pid0702223
  The plate collection and paper archives will be housed in
the new Lowell archives building and eventually organized and
indexed to current conservation standards. I may generate a
machine-readable plate-log relatively soon, but the real work
(and things like digital scanning of the plates) will await
finding money to do the preservation of this bit of Arizona
astronomical source data and history.
\Brian
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