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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."
I'd love to see the facility set up to store the output, to say nothing of processing it. I wonder how they'll archive it?
You are not the customer.
I understand this 8.4m telescope will be designed to view a wider field of view than any other 8m class telescopes (we have like five of them now). But, do we really need another large telescope that costs a few hundred millions? Or is this just another telescope engineer's way for securing a future funding resource?
For 300 Mil, we could probably build ten kick-ass instruments to utilize the existing 6m to 8m telescopes more efficiently. That's where the technology is advancing faster, too. After all, what good a telescope does when there is no good instrument to observe with?
The nation's budget is tight right now. I think we need to rethink our long term plan for the astronomical community. I personally do not feel that another 8m class telescope is what the community needs.
This is old, old news. Many of these programs are run by has-beens who resist change and are little more than entrenched bureaucracy.
It would be better to have multiple, interlinked reflector and/or schmidt-cassegrain telescopes ( these are catadioptric 'scopes which use both lenses and mirrors ) all digitally searching the sky together. We can now link such devices wirelessly over several kilometers or even statewide. If you use an asynchronous comm channel to query the telescopes' search telemetry and they reside on an intranet they can all track right ascension+declination at once to look for deep-sky objects or to track Mars. This way, you can aggregate data and pool this information as co-located segments when doing visual/radio sweeps.
The best thing about this proposal is it leaves the door open for volunteers to step in and contribute something.
I'd be willing to help process the data if they need a significant supercomputer to make the comparisons to previous nights. Or does comparing 3 Gigapixel images not really put a strain on their computers?
Oh You POS
Perhaps you should read what kind of software is there on that page. That stuff is mainly code for space hardware, which is not the realm of an astronomer, its for engineers.
I would not argue if you wrote that the telescope control software was written using Forth, which is somewhat likely, but what you said is that Forth is used for the data analysis software, and I call bullshit on that until you show me evidence otherwise.
Note: I work on a NASA project so I know something of what I'm talking about here, so please don't quote GSFC web pages at me unless you've actually worked there like I have.
This is truly not innovative at all and just copying someone else's idea. PAN-STARRS will accomplish the same thing, already has funding, and is entering the prototype phase. Sure, 1.4 Gigapixels is not as much as 3, but it will be online sooner, accomplish the same goals on a smaller telescope, and will take a week to survey the whole sky instead of three days. So this new telescope is no big deal, especially since it will only about half of the sky visible to PAN-STARRS since this new thingy will be in the very southern hemisphere, rather than Hawaii.
i understand (i work at the ctio observatory as a programmer and obviously everyone there is very excited by this news) that the lsst will require an impressive amount of computing power, but that it's not impractical - it would be possible today, although expensive, and the hope is that in a few years the hardware will be much more reasonably priced. since processing a lot of images is pretty easy to do in parallel it's likely that the hardware will be some kind of cluster rather than a traditional (old school) supercomputer (we already have parallel pipelines for processing astronomical data - see work by frank valdes at noao, for example). obviously there's a trade-off between how much processing power you do and how much bandwidth you have (since processed data is more compact) - i believe that determines the location of the computers (i'm unsure how much will be up on the mountain and how much "downtown" at the observatory's offices in la serena). as for internet connections - chile has two major commerical providers who can handle the capacity required.
personally, i'm currently part of the team working on an archive for the noao's existing telescopes (the noao in conjunction with the ncsa) and we're hoping that will help provide a basis for the data archive that the lsst will use. what's particularly cool about the lsst (at least last i heard) is that the data are public almost immediately - typically that's not the case for telescopes, where the astronomer doing the observations gets a year or so to use the data for themselves first - and that makes the archive critical. so it's a whole new paradigm - astronomers will "observe" by mining the database.
sorry i don't have more exact answers - i've sat through presentations on this to the point where my eyes glaze over at the numbers. i'm going to see if i can dig anything up that will bemore helpful...
http://www.acooke.org
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