Photomnemonic Tablet

First Appearance and Context

A photomnemonic tablet is seen in the heated chapel on the roof above the Mynster, part of the starhenge workspaces. The tablet shown contains an image‑stack of Saunt Tancred's Nebula. By sliding a fingertip along the tablet’s edge, the image recedes or advances through time, showing the nebula contracting back to the single brilliant star at the moment of its explosion. The tablet remains on a worktable for instruction and study during visits to the roof.

Roles/Actions and Affiliations

• Time‑series capture and study: Photomnemonic tablets are used with roof‑mounted instruments to accumulate nightly observations over long spans and then replay them. The all‑sky instrument known as Clesthyra’s Eye has a slot specifically sized for such a tablet, and the larger telescopes direct gathered light into a tablet for recording.
• Grandfathered device use: The tablets contain an embedded syntactic device; their use is explicitly tolerated under the Discipline as a grandfathered praxis, alongside a few other permitted technologies.
• Distribution of copies: After a long observing run of Saunt Tancred’s supernova remnant, copies of that dataset were later made and distributed to longer‑cycle orders (e.g., the Thousanders) for study.

Relationships

• Associated locations and instruments: Used on the rooftop Starhenge above the Mynster; compatible with the fixed all‑sky lens (Clesthyra’s Eye) and the dome‑housed telescopes.
• People and roles: Employed in instruction by avout cosmographers; Ita are observed working on nearby rooftop service points and cabling that support clock‑coupled instruments (Ita).
• Study exemplars: Closely tied to Saunt Tancred's Nebula and the name Saunt Tancred through a long‑running time series preserved on a tablet.

Descriptions/Characteristics

• Form factor: A disk of dark, glassy material about the size of two hands held side by side and roughly three fingers thick.
• Interaction: Sliding a finger along the tablet’s edge scrubs through the time‑stacked layers; the background starfield remains fixed while the transient object changes. The tablet supports zooming to the resolution limit of the stored images.
• Integration: Designed to be inserted into rooftop instruments (e.g., the all‑sky lens) or to receive light from the larger telescopes for nightly capture.

Current Status/Location

In active use on the Starhenge roof above the Mynster. At least one tablet (holding the Saunt Tancred dataset) rests in the heated chapel for study and demonstration during contact periods with visitors.