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Showing posts with the label preserve history

How Lasers Can Preserve History

C leopatra’s Needle is an ancient Egyptian obelisk , but right now it looks like a construction project. Scaffolding snakes up the 69-foot spire as conservancy crews clear away 3500 years of soot and grime. Originally built in honor of Pharaoh Thutmose III, the obelisk has black streaks that mark its time spent buried near the Nile, its travel across the Atlantic, and near 130 years facing the pollution-filled elements in New York City. Now it’s getting a long overdue cleaning—using high-powered lasers. The Central Park Conservancy, the organization tasked with the upkeep of all monuments and works of art in Central Park, has had the needle’s cleaning on its to-do list since 2011. The Conservancy and personnel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photo studio began documenting the obelisk and assessing exactly what the monument needed. Soon conservators came in to test different types of cleaning techniques. “The typical ways of cleaning are using chemicals or micro-ab