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Jim__

(14,074 posts)
Mon Aug 31, 2015, 08:44 PM Aug 2015

World's most powerful digital camera sees construction green light

From phys.org:

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The Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera - the world's largest - at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Assembled at the DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the camera will be the eye of LSST, revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries.

The construction milestone, known as Critical Decision 3, is the last major approval decision before the acceptance of the finished camera, said LSST Director Steven Kahn: "Now we can go ahead and procure components and start building it."

Starting in 2022, LSST will take digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights from atop a mountain called Cerro Pachón in Chile. It will produce a wide, deep and fast survey of the night sky, cataloguing by far the largest number of stars and galaxies ever observed. During a 10-year time frame, LSST will detect tens of billions of objects—the first time a telescope will observe more galaxies than there are people on Earth - and will create movies of the sky with unprecedented details. Funding for the camera comes from the DOE, while financial support for the telescope and site facilities, the data management system, and the education and public outreach infrastructure of LSST comes primarily from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The telescope's camera - the size of a small car and weighing more than three tons - will capture full-sky images at such high resolution that it would take 1,500 high-definition television screens to display just one of them.

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World's most powerful digital camera sees construction green light (Original Post) Jim__ Aug 2015 OP
I trust we won't be breaking the Prime Directive with this one... MrMickeysMom Aug 2015 #1
I would love to have the finished film running as a wallpaper for a computer. cstanleytech Sep 2015 #2

cstanleytech

(26,280 posts)
2. I would love to have the finished film running as a wallpaper for a computer.
Wed Sep 2, 2015, 02:00 PM
Sep 2015

Notice I didnt say "my computer" because my computer is a laptop that is literally being held together with 2 rolls of duct tape and it lacks probably both the power to play and the space to store such a movie.

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