Lots of little dots with no apparent pattern: Where laypeople may just see milky gray photos sprinkled with what look like random crumbs, it is enough to make astronomers' hearts miss a beat. We are talking about historical photographic plates showing negatives of the night sky. Together with the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam and the universities of Hamburg and Tartu (Estonia), researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have digitized the images and published them online. After 10 years, the project has now been completed successfully.