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New Infrared Camera Gets Amazing Orion Images
The BBC is reporting, as is the Register, about the new Wide-Field Camera (WFCAM) on the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. WFCAM is the world's most powerful astronomical infrared camera. It's 5.4 meters long and weighs 1500 kilograms. As part of its commissioning, it produced some stunning images of interstellar clouds in Orion.
Hey, check out these pics. The nice thing is that they labeled them with what the colors actually mean (instead of having people think that interstellar gas is normally green and purple, like in star trek).
Man that's a GREAT image! Congrats to the imaging team!
Ehh, no, normal folk don't. Many, many people each year climb Mount Rainier (in Washington state), which is 14,410 feet high, and my uncle's said none of his clients have ever needed supplemental air. He's a professional mountain guide with over 300 climbs of Rainier alone. Everest Base Camp, where climbers go to acclimatize, is at about 17,060 feet, and needing oxygen there is exceptionally rare; if you need it there, there's no way you're going to make it higher up on the mountain. So, at 13,760 feet, the air may be thin but there's no need for pressurized quarters or anything like that.
You're quite right that we don't use supplemental oxygen when up at the telescopes.
However, one difference that I would point out is that usually people climbing mountains such as Mount Rainier (I presume) and certainly Everest will take quite some time to trek up to these kinds of altitudes. With Mauna Kea, you can in principle get from the sea-level town of Hilo to the nearly 14,000-foot summit in a couple of hours if you don't stop to acclimatize. This is, however, an extremely bad idea! People spend acclimatization time at the 9,000-ft level.
The fact that one gets to these kinds of altitudes in a comparatively short time makes the situation slightly different from that of climbers, as far as I understand it.
Your point still stands, though... the telescope control rooms do not have enriched levels of oxygen.
This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.
I work for the Joint Astronomy Centre and did some of the work in putting those images together. If I remember correctly, I made the JPEGs from the PNGs with ImageMagick's "convert" tool. ImageMagick does seem to support JP2, but I don't know how much it is in general use (I haven't tried it myself) so I usually go for normal JPEGs in order to make sure as many people as possible can view the images.
This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.
Actually, there's a fairly solid definition of 'how powerful' a survey camera is. They point is that we're using WFCAM to survey large areas of sky - they "power" of a survey camera in this sense is basically how long it takes to image a certain area of sky down to a certain sensitivity.
WFCAM is so good because it provides both the huge field of view and also pritty good sensitivity. Certainly, a camera on a bigger telescope could be morse sensitive, but if its field of view is so much smaller that it ends up taking longer to map a big area of sky to the same sensitivity (by virtue of having to take many many seperate images in sucession then stitch them all together), then you've lost out in the long term.
(Disclaimer: I'm the instrument scientist for WFCAM)
Actually, a couple of corrections: WFCAM uses HAWAII-II arrays, not HAWAII-IIRGs, and VISTA is using arrays from Rayethon, they're not Rockwell Hawaii arrays at all.