COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—Retired astronomer Holger Pedersen found boxes containing more than 150 photographic plates, most of which were taken at the now closed Østervold Observatory, in the basement at the Niels Bohr Institute. “It is astronomy archaeology,” Pedersen explained in a press release. He has cataloged the images and wants to have them digitized for the Natural History Museum of Denmark. The oldest photographs date to 1895, and were taken with a double-lensed telescope. One glass plate of the solar eclipse in 1919 is a copy, but it shows how English astronomer Arthur Eddington tested Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, proposed in 1915. The theory suggests that light traveling from a distant star would be bent by the gravity of a massive object as it passed. Eddington traveled to Brazil to photograph the solar eclipse and saw that light from stars close to the sun really did bend. “It is astronomy from a different age,” said Johan Fynbo of the Niels Bohr Institute. To read more about the archaeology of the contemporary world, go to "Where There's Smoke..."
