A fifteen-minute Flash presentation, a long-dead browser plugin, and a voice I had not heard for a very long time.
While rummaging around in the older parts of the website I came across another small piece of astronomical archaeology: an old presentation from Global Rent-a-Scope (GRAS), the remote-telescope network I used extensively during the 2000s.
A great many of my astronomical images from that period came through GRAS. Many of them still have SMacB / GRAS written in the corner, which now makes a rather useful date-stamp on that particular period of my astrophotography.
GRAS was founded by astronomer and astrophotographer Arnie Rosner (1937–2020). Brad Moore later became a major figure in developing and running the network, which subsequently evolved into iTelescope.
I had forgotten the name for a moment, but the instant I was reminded of it: Arnie. Of course.
I spoke to him on several occasions back in the GRAS days, usually when something had gone wrong with one of the telescopes. This was also around the period when internet/IP telephony still felt like an exciting new piece of technology rather than simply another way for somebody to ring you.
Arnie was always a nice chap to deal with, patient and helpful even when the reason for the conversation was invariably along the lines of, “the telescope appears to have stopped doing telescope things.”
The file I rediscovered is an old Camtasia/Adobe Flash presentation about processing astronomical images. More importantly, the narration is by Arnie himself.
I saved the presentation from the GRAS website in around 2008. The presentation itself may be older than that; 2008 is simply when Past Me decided to acquire a copy from the website files.
Yes. I extracted it from the site rather than waiting nearly twenty years for somebody to invent the phrase “digital preservation” as my defence. Guilty as charged.
As far as I can tell, this particular presentation is no longer available through the present-day iTelescope material, which made the old files rather more interesting once I realised what I had actually kept.
Naturally, opening the original page in 2026 produced very little. The HTML still contained an ancient Flash <object>, complete with references to Macromedia and a Shockwave plugin which modern Firefox quite reasonably regards as belonging to the archaeological record.
The first attempt at reviving it with Ruffle did at least wake up the old controller, but initially produced little more than a blank rectangle.
The browser console supplied the next clue. The controller was looking for star-color-web_config.xml.
That file had survived too. Once restored, the original Camtasia player skin appeared — but still no presentation.
The configuration file then revealed what the controller had been waiting for all along: star-color-web.swf.
Another trawl through the old files located a surviving copy of that as well. The chain was finally complete: original controller, original configuration, original presentation, with Ruffle standing in for the deceased Flash Player.
It took a little while to load, the old controls appeared... and then it started playing.
There is something slightly strange about recovering old digital material like this. At first it was simply a technical challenge: can this ancient Flash thing still be made to work?
Then Arnie started talking.
Suddenly it was not merely an obsolete web presentation. It was a recording of someone I had actually spoken to during the years when GRAS was a regular part of my astronomy, explaining image processing in his own voice.
The original presentation has therefore been left essentially as it was, including the wonderfully period Camtasia controls and equally period image-processing software. I have only added a modern wrapper around it and Ruffle to make the original Flash files playable again.
Watch the restored GRAS Star Colour presentation here
It runs for about fifteen minutes. Depending on connection speed there may be a short pause while the original SWF loads; nearly twenty-year-old Flash software was apparently not designed with impatience in 2026 in mind.
GRAS itself did not simply disappear: the remote-telescope concept continued and developed into iTelescope. But this little presentation belongs very specifically to the earlier GRAS era — the same era represented by all those old images in my archive carrying the credit SMacB / GRAS.
I am rather glad Past Me pinched a copy.
For once, his digital hoarding has been formally vindicated.