On April 7th, 2020, the Wolbach Library at the Center for Astrophysics  | Harvard & Smithsonian was featured in an article on the travel website Atlas Obscura. The article, “Even More Ways to Help Librarians and Archivists From Home” by Jessica Leigh Hester, features six different transcription and citizen science…

Hi everyone! Sam and Nico here, the organizers of the the Zooniverse Star Notes project. We just wanted to take this time to express our immense gratitude. These are very difficult and uncertain times; we hope that all of our volunteers are safe and healthy. Taking care of ourselves and…

The Wolbach Library wishes good health to everyone during this unprecedented global crisis. This month’s playlist includes some videos relating to COVID-19, including advice from astronauts about social distancing, book recommendations for quarantine, and speculation on how getting sick on Mars or the Moon might differ from getting sick on…

Last week, “human computer” Katharine Johnson passed away. Johnson’s calculations of orbital mechanics were instrumental to the success of NASA’s Apollo missions. One of the first African-American women scientists to work at NASA, Johnson’s time at NASA was fictionalized in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.  This month’s playlist includes videos…

In the mid-19th century, the popular exchange of current scholarship between academic institutions led to the creation of Harvard College Observatory astronomical literature collection. At that time, the materials were housed in the Phillips Library, where they remained into the early 20th century. The collection continued to grow, and in…

Hi everyone! Sam and Nico here, from the Wolbach Library. One month ago, we launched our Zooniverse project Star Notes, a crowdsourcing project that continues the work of Project PHaEDRA. Can you believe that it’s already been a month since we launched our project? We are super grateful to everyone…

Highlights… Watch new, never-before-captured high resolution footage of the Sun’s surface; NASA says goodbye to the Spitzer Space Telescope; Sky watchers can see great views of the constellation Orion in February; Emily Sandford breaks down the physics and ethics of an elevator to the Moon; SciShow explains how you can…

Hi everyone, We are happy to announce that a new project is now up on the Zooniverse website: Star Notes. This project is connected to Project PHaEDRA at the John G. Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The goal of Project PHaEDRA is to catalog, digitize, and transcribe…

Happy New Year!  Highlights… NASA test drives the new Mars 2020 rover; CuriousDroid unravels the past and present of hydrogen energy and aero-space travel; Astronaut Don Pettit discusses launching rockets from the Moon; The Planet Protection team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory break down why microbiology matters in space; SciShow…

Today, we launched version 3.1.0 of the UAT! This year has been an exciting one for the UAT; on June 3rd, the American Astronomical Society formally incorporated the UAT into its journal submission process.  The UAT has also been included in the most recent call for proposals for the Hubble…