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."

Comments

Holy Storage Area Network Batman!

[Limburgher]

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?

use distributed telescope arrays

[Anonymous Coward]

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.