Mapping Historic Skies

Why are we doing this?

There are a number of goals for this project. The first goal is to crop images of individual constellations from the Adler's collection of more than 4,000 historical constellation maps and depictions. The second goal is to identify the constellation in each image.

Why do you need to crowdsource these tasks?

The Adler Collections team is quite small: only one curator and one full-time digital collections staff member. Help from the crowd allows us to undertake this effort in a much more feasible amount of time. Because many of the images contain multiple constellations, often spaced close together, this process cannot be automated.

What is the museum workflow?

In November 2019, the Adler will open Chicago's Night Sky, an exhibit dedicated to the sky we all share. Mapping Historic Skies will be featured in the exhibit via the Zooniverse App. The exhibit workflow will invite visitors to help us by drawing boxes around individual constellations in an image.

What will you do with the results?

When an image is retired from the museum workflow (segmentation/cropping), we'll use some custom Python code to aggregate the data, resulting in individual constellation images. When the entire dataset is complete, we'll upload these images into the Adler Collections database, so that researchers can view a variety of depictions of a single constellation -- by a number of artists, over time, from different geographic areas, etc.

In the Identify Constellations workflow, what if a pink box is drawn around more than one constellation, or it isn't clear which constellation is meant to be identified?

If it's unclear which constellation is meant to be identified, use your best judgement and identify what you believe to be the 'main' constellation included in the box. When you submit your classification, choose "Done & Talk" and leave a comment on the subject using the hashtag #checkthebox so the research team can check and adjust the coordinates.