Harvard University attracts some of the brightest minds from all over the world. With those bright minds come world-class facilities, incredible research projects, and priceless collections. At the end of the 19th century, the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge started to receive glass photographic plates taken by the university’s telescopes in Massachusetts, California, Peru, and South Africa. The collection of plates allowed for astronomists to measure the variability and colors of stars over the full sky for the first time. The project continued until 1992, resulting in a collection that consists of more than half a million images.
