The world’s largest and most advanced digital camera has been installed on the Pan-STARRS-1 (PS1) telescope on Haleakala, Maui.
“This is a truly giant instrument,” explained astronomer John Tonry, who led the team that developed the new camera. “It allows us to measure the brightness of the sky in 1.4 billion places simultaneously. We get an image that is 38,000 by 38,000 pixels in size, or about 200 times larger than you get in a high-end consumer digital camera. It’s also extremely sensitive: in a typical observation we will be able to detect stars that are 10 million times fainter than can be seen with the naked human eye.”
The silicon chips at the heart of the camera were developed in collaboration with Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They contain advanced circuitry that makes instantaneous corrections for any image shake caused by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The image area, which is about 16 inches (40 cm) across, contains 60 identical silicon chips, each of which contains 64 independent imaging circuits. Splitting the image area into about 4,000 separate regions in this way has three advantages: data can be recorded more quickly, “dazzling” of the image by a very bright star is confined to a small region, and any defects in the chips only affect only a small part of the image area.
Wow!
But is it a cell phone also?.. I bet it has an ‘Apple’ sticker on it somewhere.
Ha Ha Ha Ha, Wait a few months and you can buy one at Best Buy for $99
This should go well with the new ultra hi-res field emission displays! Goodbye, LCD TV’s…
http://tinyurl.com/2zte69
Wouldn’t this be even more effective in orbit?
I want to work here….
http://www.maui.afmc.af.mil/
Awww Saweet!!!! I love cameras…
They remind me of camera phones…
Which of course reminds me of the iPhone(btw needs a new blog post)
Which reminds me of the last time I hijacked a thread and got spanked!!!
Whoooo Spanking! I looked at a thread about spanking in the library once.
// ignoring non related comments
#3 We can take pictures on the ground with better resolution that Hubble can. Newer technology, and using our atmosphere as a gigantic lens.
For it to work, you need to take lots of high speed pictures of the same spot in the sky, per second, and eliminating the blurred pics.
Thanks to digital cams like this, will be easier to do.
Read up on this link, with a COOL PICTURE I CAN’T INCLUDE because I must have gotten spanked too many times myself.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/09/04/sharp_snaps/
Anyhow, a very good read, and WHY risk the lives of our astronauts over Hubble? It can’t even take sharp images of the Moon because the Moon moves too quickly.
Best Buy just dropped the price on these. Think I’ll pick one up on the way home.
Does it come with software that automatically updates the University of Hawaii’s Flickr page?
That beats the crap out of my EOS 20D.
Neat!
“Anyhow, a very good read, and WHY risk the lives of our astronauts over Hubble? It can’t even take sharp images of the Moon because the Moon moves too quickly.”
Um, because we already know what the moon looks like? Hubble was and is the most successful single piece of scientific hardware in history, and abandoning it out of cowardice strikes me as kind of silly. The world would be a worse place without all of the stunning imagery that telescope has provided for us over the years, and we’ve only imaged a small portion of the sky with it.
Everyone always focus on the camera chips. True, it’s nice with a lot of pixels in the detector as well as good sensitivity, but you’re going nowhere without good optics. If your optics can’t provide enough resolution, a larger chip won’t help. All it will do is over-sample the image.
#10, Li, absolutely. And now we’ve got the Spitzer space telescope and a host of others in orbit so we can combine infrared, visible and ultraviolet images, producing data only dreamed of a decade ago.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/
Don’t forget the Hubble Deep Field.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/01/
#11, Bigby, yep, optics are the key. And some of the new adaptive optics with extremely large segmented mirrors are impressive, especially when linked for optical interferometry.
In the planning stages, the SKA will test Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to the limit – and perhaps prove it wrong. World’s largest radio telescope – 1 million sq. meters:
http://tinyurl.com/yw8d4k
Here’s the largest ground based optical telescope planned — I can’t believe the aperture.
http://www.eso.org/projects/owl/
Yeah, but at that resolution the memory card will probably fill up after just a few pictures.
#13,
I am against the OWL project, and here is why. It would be an environmental catastrophe. It is a well known fact by amature astronomers that each inch of aperture on your new telescope causes one month of cloudy skys and rain. That thing would cause a flood that made the genesis flood look incidental.
Just say no to large scale weather modification.
#15 – I thought that was Planet X / Red Dwarf, that does a flyby in our solar system every 3600 years. Not telescope optics.
Apparently in 2012 we’re in deep trouble.
Some of the so-called pictures of our Sun’s binary sun, taken only when the sun is setting, looks like lens flare / reflection.
So perhaps this camera will be sensitive enough to show the orbiting planets around this red dwarf, one of these planets hosts our genetic creators.
// How’s that for thread hijacking !
as soon as digital surpasses analog (read: the human brain)
this might matter
#15, GregA, oh no, not the dreaded “first light” syndrome. Just one new 24 inch scope guarantees about two weeks of rain and/or cloudy weather. Maybe they’ll have to build an ark to go with that OWL! Aaarrrggghh!! 😆
1.4 GIGApixel camera! Drool…
#19 – F.,
Just occurred to me to do that calculation too. 1.444gp. Wow is right. How long before gp cameras make it to mainstream, I wonder? By then, these guys’ll be getting terapixels.