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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."

2 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Filesize of the pictures by neur0maniak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just imagine how big they'll be.. 350Mb(yes, megabits!) x 24bpp = 8.4Gb (Gigabits) = 1.05GB (Gigabytes). And that's without compression. How long would that take to compress, too?

    1. Re:Filesize of the pictures by faxafloi · · Score: 2, Interesting
      From the project description at CEA:
      Each exposure will produce about 770 MB of data; the mosaic will be read out in about 20 seconds which means that Megacam will produce approximately 100 images (science fields and calibration) per night, ie 77 GB of data each night or about 1 TB of data for an average observing run.

      So it will likely be 16bpp, not 24. Astronomical images are usually FITS, not JPEG.

      Large images like this are becoming the norm in astronomy. Double the dimensions of a CCD and you quadruple the file size. With mosaiced chips like this one, you can easily get monster images. Then there's the processing, where you're usually juggling several similar-sized images. Looks like CEA is addressing this.

      Incidentally, if they did want to compress these, some lossy algorithms (wavelets, Starck) do well on astronomical images. Most of what you lose in those cases is the sky noise, as long as you don't select too high a compression factor. The DSS did very well with 10x wavelet compression.
      --
      Exit, pursued by a bear.