It’s not very often that stars align. Well, on second thought, given the numbers of stars and all of the possible alignments, you could say stars align all the time. But when your personal interests intersect with your professional life, it can be quite interesting. In my spare time, I like to look at and take images of the stars through a telescope. Not only stars, but planets and deep sky objects as well.

Amateur astronomy has changed quite significantly in the last 10 years. With the technological enhancements in observing equipment, and the decrease in the price of very powerful instruments, the amateur is capable of some truly amazing work. And with that work can come vast amounts of data. Each individual image is in essence, a permanent record, not only for that specific session, but indeed for the object in question as well.

While the need to preserve, index and be able to maintain access to this information is purely for my own purposes, my experience actually mirrors the largest studies done by professional astronomers. I have thousands of images, and mostly keep them on my computer, with multiple backups. Professional and government funded programs have millions upon millions of images and prints of the data they have captured over the years.

So what does this have to do with Records Management or Information Governance? Well, since this information does not really ever “expire” it is somewhat different from non-transitory data. But as a problem to solve, the requirement to keep, index, and be able to find information quickly, this problem is the same that many companies deal with on a daily basis. There are many examples of repositories that have done  a very good job with this, such as The Multimission Archive at STSci.( http://archive.stsci.edu/index.html). Others are merely a single web page with links to images, such as The Astronomy Picture of the Day( http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html). So when you are looking for examples of managing large amounts of data, these links provide some interesting examples. The other thing this has to do with records? Well, it lets me talk about one of my private passions as part of my professional life, which I always enjoy. Plus, if you have never seen some of these images, they are really quite amazing.