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New Wide-Angle Telescope to Capture Night Sky

NewScientist is reporting that a new telescope located in Chile is aiming to capture images of the entire night sky every three nights. From the article: "The telescope will use a digital camera with 3 billion pixels to image the entire sky across three nights, producing an expected 30 terabytes of data per night. This will allow astronomers to detect objects that quickly change their position, such as near-Earth asteroids, or their brightness, such as supernovae."

8 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. lots of questions ? by warrior_s · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wonder how much processing power will be needed to process such a huge amount of data inorder to extract something meaningful out of this data.
    Does Chile have some state of art suprcomputers to achieve this or are they going to send the data to some other country for analysis.
    And if they decide to transfer data to some other country how are they going to achieve that.. is data transfer on Internet feasible for 30 TB per night of data ?

    1. Re:lots of questions ? by Pedrito · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Does Chile have some state of art suprcomputers to achieve this...

      No, they plan on using some tin cans and a string and the guys are just going to relay the 0's and 1's off to a country with actual electricity and stuff.

      Please go read a little about Chile. They don't live in the dark ages there. It's actually a pretty modern country and hosts to some of the biggest telescopes in the world. Just because they have clean air doesn't make them Neanderthals.

  2. billion: 10^9 or 10^12 ? by Janek+Kozicki · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Ok, so how do i know if the submitter is native english speaker or not? According to wikipedia, billion - english speakers think that billion is 10^9, while non-english speakers think that it's 10^12. It is troubling me, because I wanted to quickly calculate what's the size of the pixel matrix, but I can't because of that ambiguity :(

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  3. Re:Prioritize our needs by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The ability to scan the entire sky in high resolution in one go WILL be a benefit to every other telescope on earth.

    As soon as this thing detects anything strange, the other specific scopes can be aimed in that direction.

    Without this, its blind luck whether an event will be witnessed.

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    liqbase :: faster than paper
  4. Re:UFO'S by bohemian72 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I would actually expect it to take three nights ;-)

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    The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
  5. Re:easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Seems to me that someone interested in sex, sexuality and pleasure has a more rich life than someone that isn't. Isn't it funny that people so often say "You're interested in things that I'm not, and you have a broader, different and more accepting perspective on the world than me? How sad your little life must be, always trying new things and learning more about humanity, life, and yourself."

    You're probably too busy not learning and not experiencing to have noticed, though.

  6. Re:Holy Storage Area Network Batman! by iminplaya · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What's another $300mil? Ugh.

    A little over a day in Iraq. As a taxpayer, I would rather fund the telescope.

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  7. Re:The mirrors? by deathcow · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This isn't about the quality of figuring, undoubtably that is world class over the entirety of all optical surfaces. This is about the amount of aberrations that affect the telescope particularly near the edge. Astigmatism, coma, etc.