Slashdot Mirror
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.
You, sir, have way too much time on your hands. Enjoy the holiday, instead of trolling. It'll make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
-gjr
I love the composite shot, showing the zoom steppings, putting it all into perspective... The max zoom quality is jaw dropping.
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).
It's an infra red telescope and all that... it can see a lot of stuff in space BUT the photo I really loved was this Down to Earth Night shot of the telescope itself....
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Man that's a GREAT image! Congrats to the imaging team!
Check out the object on the right edge toward the bottom of the xlarge picture. It looks remarkably like a spiral galaxy seen edge on. If I understand this image correctly that galaxy wouldn't be visible in the visible through that cloud. If so, it must be terrifically bright in the IR.
Credo sim. - I think I am.
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.
Were they able to get nice, clear shots of Orion's belt?
Yes, I work there. No, I don't use oxygen. Below about 15000 feet the TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) is "indefinite" which means some people can go hang out for 12-14 hours with nothing bad happening. There are some observatories up there that are talking about creating a single pressurized "break room" for staff - not where I work, though. :)
Oh, and the Rockwell HAWAII-2RG 2048x2048 sensors used to build UKIRT's WFCAM (it has 4 of them in a square array) were co-developed by U. of Hawaii, Rockwell Scientific and UMC, and first deployed in November of 2003 in the "ULB" camera on 88. For some time, 88 with ULB was the most powerful infrared setup for astrophotography; since UKIRT is the largest dedicated infrared scope in the world, it will now (with its own 16-megapixel camera) really take some great pictures. :) I was over at UKIRT for their 25th anniversary open house, and it's one BIG instrument.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
"I have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I have seen C-beams glitter in the darkness at the Tannhauser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."
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.
Not trying to take away anything from UKIRT (which is an awesome telescope from user's perspective), what do they mean by "most powerful" here? To me it means highest sensitivity to IR light or highest spatial resolution achievable with the combination of detector (which is the theme of this release) and its optical system (UKIRT). Apparently this instrument provides the largest field of view, which is cool indeed, but would that deserves "most powerful" title? It's a bit self-serving statement to me.
Again, I'm not making light of the instrument. Some people -- those who perform sky survey, etc. -- would find it "most powerful" indeed. But others like me (spectroscopists) would find that statement rather weak. Images are cool, but it can tell you very little about the physical condition of these objects.
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.
Disclaimer: I'm the instrument scientist for WFCAM.
We did actually submit the story to slashdot, thinging they might want to scoop the BBC and The Register for a change. Got rejected, but anyway. I thought Slashdot types might be interested in some of the techy background to the instrument:
WFCAM generates about 200GB of data per night. The data is handled (recorded then processed) by a cluster of 8 PCs (Ahem, why yes, they do run Linux), each of which has a ~650GB RAID array.
An interesting point to note is that in total, the WFCAM system contains a total of about 60 hard disks. No commercial hard disk is rated for use above 10,000 feet, and UKIRT is at almost 14,000. Hard disks rely on atmospheric air pressure to keep the heads seperated from the disk surface, so we've even found keeping the RAIDs running had at times presented quite a challenge.
Also, of course the PCs are fan cooled. Fan cooling doesn't work too well when there's only 60% of the air they're used to (atmospheric pressure on the summit of Mauna Kea is about 60% that at sea level), and with the combination of 2.8GHz Xeons and half a dozen disks in each 3U rackmount machine, we had to fairly seriosuly beef up the case fans to keep the machines at a sane temperature.