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350 Megapixel Camera

Posted by michael on from the eight-by-ten-glossies dept.

Remy Hathaway writes "Ars Technica just posted an article on the "MegaCam", a 350 megapixel camera. The original story is from the Honolulu Advertiser."

3 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Additional info on their website... by stienman · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those too busy to go to their website:

    The imager is made up of 40 silicon imagers, each of which has two imaging surfaces on it, for a total of 80 channels of about 4.3 megapixels each. There are gaps between the silicon imagers. Images they make have black borders around them so that the image spatially is like looking through a window with bars. The imagers are rectangular, and are set up in a pattern somewhat like this

    .HHHHHHHHH
    HHHHHHHHHHH
    HHHHHHHHHHH
    .HHHHHHHHH
     The periods are due to slashdot's inability to do & nbsp;, & #160;, etc. The #'s I was going to use in place of H caused the lameness filter to spew "Too many junk characters." I guess I didn't realize I had a junk character account, nevermind that it is apparently overdrawn!

    It takes a full ten seconds to get the data from the sensors, and there is a rotating shutter above it. The time to take the image and then copy it off the array is long enough that they can only obtain about 1TB of data on a typical veiwing night.

    -Adam

  2. Re:god... by _pruegel_ · · Score: 2, Informative
    Quote from their camera pictures page:
    Cryogenic The cooling is done using a "pulse tube", a closed-cycle cooler with no moving part, therefore no vibrations. The cold capacity is used to keep the CCD mosaic cold during the installation of the instrument at the prime focus.
    So yes, it is cooled.
  3. CCD mosaic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    they actually use CCD mosaic. There are 38 CCD chips of which 36 are usable, each 9 Mega pixel.
    Total resolution is about 18000x18000. At 0.2" visibility (the best you get anywhere on earth), this gives 1 degree FOV. It is large in total pixels, but each chip is not. Largest single CCD ever made is about 63 Mega pixel. Largest in 35 mm digital cameras are 16 mega pixels. Mosaics are suitable in astronomy where they don't mind a line here and there not exposed.



    The most important characteristic of astronomy CCD chip is back illumination which gives ultra high efficiency and extremely low noise.



    I believe, there is another project where they plan more than giga pixel mosaic. But forgot the project name or link.