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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).
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)