The GALAXY (General Automatic Luminosity and X, Y) measuring machine of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh was completed in 1969 and has been in continuous use since October. It scans a plate, notes the position of all images between preassigned limits and measures some, or all, of these for magnitude and position. The machine was conceived as an attempt to answer the “Schmidt Problem”: how best to handle the immense amount of data that plates taken with Schmidt cameras contain. The general concept of the present machine is due to Professor P. B. Fellgett but the credit for actually bringing the concept to fruition belongs to Dr. V. C. Reddish of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and a small design team of what is now Faul Coradi Scotland Ltd.