Hudec, the Czech astrophysicist, who has visited more than 70 plate collections across the world, estimates that there could be 10 million plates still in existence. If all those plates were carefully digitized, they would amount to thousands of terabytes of data. They hold more than a century of astronomical observations. And though they are scattered around the world and unwieldy to work with, they’ve provided today’s researchers with more than 100 modern discoveries.
