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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."
Finally equipment good enought to catch the UFO's in action!!!
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.
You should submit it to NASA!
They'll put up a few bittorrent files and name them "Jenna Jameson porn XXX" and such.
Great, So they've got a 3 Gigapixel camera. Always trying to one-up me, I see.
-gjr
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 ?
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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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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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
Mods, please don't mod this up. Its bullshit. True that Forth was in *1976* was made the official language of the IAU, but no astronomer uses Forth these days, and there's no hint anywhere that the guys who run this telescope are going to be using it either. These days Astronomers are more likely to use Python, Perl, C, C++, Java and other modern languages to write their data analysis tools in.
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of 1000 3-Megapixel cameras taking pictures of the sky through telescopes, and do that every 3 nights. That's how impressive this project is going to be.
Oh You POS
Actually, most astronomers use FORTRAN there days. Packages like AIPS and MIRIAD are completely written in them.
:-)
The newer stuff like AIPS++ uses C++.
I'm working on one of these next-generation telescopes, it LOFAR, we hope to have it operational in 2008. All software is written in C++, except for some user interfaces in Java.
The telescope in the topic is only a dream at this point, they have nowhere near the funding to start yet. LOFAR on the other hand is already being build. Our software correlator is already running on our IBM BlueGene, making it the 9th fastest computer in the world. Our 144 GBit/s links to the sub-stations are operational, and the first full substation (of 77) will be operational next month.
These guys are talking 30 TByte/day, we're talking a raw datarate of 1.5 Petabyte/day at the end of 2008. This is going to be the largest radio-telescope in the world, at 300km (200 mi.), at least until SKA gets build (if it gets build)
It's a realy cool project
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I'm not sure I'd call the study of the origin and structure of the entire universe "narrow", but be that as it may... The data set that will come out of this instrument (if it's ever built) will be on an entirely different scale than anything astronomers have had to deal with. There are lots of things that can be done with such an instrument - lensing surveys, redshift surveys, variable stars, supernova searches... Pretty much anything requiring a wide search where you don't know the exact locations of the interesting bits.
The Hubble (for example) will always be better if you want to look at a specific spot very closely, but a high resolution survey of the entire Southern sky every few nights is hardly of limited interest! My only concern is that it's too much - a few days of data could keep people busy for a very long time!
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.
These days Astronomers are more likely to use Python, Perl, C, C++, Java and other modern languages to write their data analysis tools in.
;)
Well, for the astronomers I support, I see use of Fortran (usually 77) more than anything. Maybe a little C or Perl, but none of the other stuff (excepting Python for stuff like Pyraf...). Unless you want to count iraf and/or IDL scripts as a programming language.
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.
the paparazzi will be using it to view J-Lo's ass!
Libertas in infinitum
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.
"... oh wait, those are just dead pixels. Sorry; Our bad."
http://outcampaign.org/