  Where appropriate repositories are not available to support all relevant
astronomical data products, data can fall into darkness: unseen and unavailable
for future reference and re-use. Some data in this category are legacy or old
data, but newer datasets are also often uncurated and could remain "dark". This
paper provides a description of the design motivation and development of
Astrolabe, a cyberinfrastructure project that addresses a set of community
recommendations for locating and ensuring the long-term curation of dark or
otherwise at-risk data and integrated computing. This paper also describes the
outcomes of the series of community workshops that informed creation of
Astrolabe. According to participants in these workshops, much astronomical dark
data currently exist that are not curated elsewhere, as well as software that
can only be executed by a few individuals and therefore becomes unusable
because of changes in computing platforms. Astronomical research questions and
challenges would be better addressed with integrated data and computational
resources that fall outside the scope of existing observatory and space mission
projects. As a solution, the design of the Astrolabe system is aimed at
developing new resources for management of astronomical data. The project is
based in CyVerse cyberinfrastructure technology and is a collaboration between
the University of Arizona and the American Astronomical Society. Overall the
project aims to support open access to research data by leveraging existing
cyberinfrastructure resources and promoting scientific discovery by making
potentially-useful data in a computable format broadly available to the
astronomical community.
