Fermilab Builds 500-Megapixel Camera

heyitsme writes "Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, is part of a collaboration on an experiment to measure the properties of dark energy. The Dark Energy Survey would measure the history of the expansion rate of the universe more precisely than ever before, using the largest camera ever built with Charge Coupled Devices (CCD). The 500 megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) would be placed on an existing 4-meter telescope located in north-central Chile at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The DECam together with the CTIO 4-meter telescope will allow for a survey of 15 percent of the sky to light levels faint enough to measure the colors of galaxies at redshift one."

Comments

Filesize?

[FSWKU]

I would hate to see how much space one frame from this thing takes up...

Re:Filesize?

[TrollBurger]

Rough approximations based from this:

Uncompressed:
2MP = 4.32 MB

Thus
1MP = 2.16 MB

Thus
500 x 2.16 MB

Equals

1080 MB

So, I'd put it at basically over 1 gig for a single image. Then factor in things like compression etc, but that'd be my estimate.

Re:Filesize?

[BWJones]

I have heard that some sites are planning a huge SneakerNet (or, rather, JumboNet? CessnaNet?) and hoping to fly out stacks of DAT tapes of the unreduced data back "home."

So, we here in academia are a bit spoiled in terms of bandwidth. However, companies and some in academics have to pay for lots of bits and bytes and are thus interested in costs to move these sorts of data. I was talking with Jim Gray a couple of weeks ago and he was telling me that a recent study revealed some of the true costs of moving lots of data. For instance: Lets say you are trying to move a terabyte of data from London to Los Angeles. It turns out it is cheaper (and faster) to put it on magnetic storage and fly it from London to Los Angeles than it is to try and move it over the Internet.

Just Think...

[gr3g]

The digital zoom on that would be immense. You could take a picture in a city environment and just spend the next couple of days looking at everything you would miss at first glance. Kind of creepy, but the "neat!" factor overwhelms here.

Re:Just Think...

[baritono]

Keep in mind, however, that this is going to be used with a reflector telescope. And that this telescope has a 4-meter aperture. The primary mirror in a telescope of this size costs millions of dollars, and is machined to an incredibly precise level of accuracy. The question is, when do we get parabolic reflector handheld digicams?

Nice piece of kit!

[Paul Townend]

The article mentions "The five-year DES hopes to generate about 100 terabytes of data" that will be released to the public at regular intervals....

This kit is probably one example of why the world needs more 92 Tbs routers; sharing the data generated by this baby will probably be a task not unlike that faced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. You're going to have to have a really nice architecture and set of protocols to be able to efficiently pass around these images - possibly this is where Grid Technology comes in to play....

Of course, then you'll need something to actually process the images on! I guess Intel and AMD still have a rosy future ahead of them...

All I know of Science I learnt from HHGTTG

[Crypto Gnome]

And just like the "scientists" used the FINITE Improbability Generator at parties to "simultaneously shift all the atoms in the hostesses undergarments 12 inches to the left", I'm dead-set certain there's some scientists out there thinking up "alternate uses" for this technology:

Lower-Echelon-Science-Geek: "mmmm, high-resolution pr0n".

from the womens toilets , no doubt, as even astronomical geeks don't get "any"

And I know for absolute certain what all you (well, us) SlashDOTerS were thinking:

How-TO: Instantaneous Infallible SlashDOT Effect -> Post ONE image from this camera online.

An alternate title for this article could have been:

FermiLAB Scientists seek to prove Theories behind the Origins of The SlashDOT Effect

Astroid Hunter?

[BurritoJ]

So, if this thing can see 15% of the sky at a shot, can it be used to look for incoming 'Global Killers?'

cost of storage

[pablo_max]

That actually would not cost to much more to store when compared to the cost of getting your film done at a 1 hour photo.
Considering I payed 10 bucks for a 50 pack of cd's which is about normal. So * that by 700 meg and /by 1.7gig and you've got 20.5 pictures @ 49 cents a pic.Now to develope a single 25 picture roll of kodak APS film is 10.00 (9.99 actually). so thats 40 cents a print.
Yes I know it would be hard to break the image between three disks but im just saying cost wise its not much at all.

RHIC isn't pure linux...

[caveat]

i did some work at Brookhaven National Lab a while back; i hooked up with a cute chick who was into physics and got to slum around the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider quite a bit (mostly the STAR detector, for those who care). i almost choked when i saw a win2k workstation humming away, but that was just the interface computer (there tend to be a lot of interns and such working, so a windows frontend is handy, cuts back the learning curve quite a bit). the rest of the lot was a hodgepodge of unix kit; the really really mission-critical hardware (the stuff that actually ran the collider) was running Solaris, at least as near as i could tell, along with quite a few linux and sgi boxes around for data processing and visualization (if you want pretty posters, get the gold ion collisions from the website).

pixel size < cell size

[morcheeba]

If you're 6 feet tall and we use the long dimension of the image (240k pixels), that's 7.62 microns per pixel. A typical cell is 10 microns, so we've got a pretty detailed picture of you.