Bill Gates and Microsoft Fund Telescope

coondoggie writes "Bill Gates and the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences this week donated $30 million to an ambitious telescope that researchers say will be able to survey the entire sky every three nights — something never done before. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project got $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. Expected to see its "first light" in 2014, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3 billion-pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move. With the telescope scientists will be able to quickly find Earth-threatening asteroids and exploding stars called supernovas and will be able to map out 100 billion galaxies, according to researchers."

Comments

It looks like you're trying...

[gimpeh]

...to scan the sky!

Do you want to

• create a document template?
• send an email to a friend?
• send the invasion fleet to a new planet?

Re:ah!

[morgan_greywolf]

Most probably not.

In addition to receiving funding from Bill Gates and Microsoft, another sponsor was the Charles Simonyi Foundation. Charles Simonyi, for those who are not aware, was responsible for Microsoft Office as head of Microsoft's Applications division for many years. Much of the early version of Microsoft Word for MS-DOS and Multiplan were coded by Simonyi. He is the originator of the so-called 'Hungarian' notion for identifiers prevalent among M$ developers, where an identifier's type is embedded in the name, so you get variables like sName or nCount.