100 Meter OWL Telescope Project

mindpixel writes: "The European South Observatory (my employer) is getting VERY serious about building the OWL (OverWhelmingly Large) 100 meter telescope. Check out this new site dedicated to the project. You can see some cool diagrams of what the OWL telescope will look like and some simulated images here." For more about telescopes of unusual size, you might read McKinstry's interview last year.

Comments

Future Surveys will be electronic

[StupendousMan]

Well, ok, camera resolution might not be so important in most research, but I would imagine that doing the Palomar sky survey (hundreds of huge plates) with CCDs would be impossible (it would probably require trillions of pictures).

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is using CCDs to map one quarter of the entire sky, in five passbands. Its main camera uses a mosaic of 30 2048x2048 CCDs to cover an area about 2.5 degrees across (although there are gaps between the chips). Other mosaic cameras have even more pixels.

Future ground-based surveys will use electronic detectors, not photographic plates. The increased sensitivity and linearity of electronic detectors, plus their inherent digital output, make them far superior to plates.