Slashdot Mirror
World's Largest Digital Camera Project Passes Critical Milestone
An anonymous reader writes in with a link about the progress of one of the coolest astronomy projects around. "A 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera designed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is now one step closer to reality. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope camera, which will capture the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed, has received 'Critical Decision 1' approval by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to move into the next stage of the project. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics."
that DOE is doing this and not NASA.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I hate when articles can't use standard units. Are petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes not really usable yet?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I thought we had terabytes and above for "zillions of gigabytes"?
It will probably come standard on the iPhone 6. The Android people will say they have it now.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I would think that it would also help track down just about everything in the Solar system, when using successive pictures of the same portion of the sky in a "Blinker" box or whatever they use in place of that now. Dark matter is all fine and dandy, but the location and trajectory of Asteroids and comets are of a different degree of importance!
any unauthorized spaceships, doomsday stars and other prohibited devices should not be left in orbit without at least cloaking :p
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
And don't even ask about the amount of hard drive space to Photoshop the cosmos.
Gently reply
... just waiting to be dumbed-down with an instagram filter.
This is great news. Remember the scene in Star Wars where Obi-Wan uses that 3D star map, projecting from a crystal ball?
With this, if the weekly image is public, we could actually create such real-time maps.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
The first image would compress a factor of 2-5 depending on how good the S/N. Each image after that x100 using delta compression, unless there is something really funky going on in our neck of the woods
... turn a KH-12 satellite around.
Have gnu, will travel.
Comparing a hypothetical science instrument to an old grade of consumer device is poor hype. A better comparison is the 1.4 billion pixel camera on Pan Starrs that has been on the sky for two years now or the 340 megapixel CFHT-Megacam that has been on the sky for over nine years. If LSST is delayed much longer, a 3.4 billion pixel astronomy camera will sound like 8 megapixels in an SLR does today: obsolete.
I'm getting ready to pull the trigger to buy one of the new Canon 5D Mark III's soon....and thought I'd have quite a camera.
I guess this one wins the megapixel wars hands down.
With that many MP's though...I wonder how their ISO levels are?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
More to be said - here's the scientific FAQ: http://www.lsst.org/lsst/faq-science
Choice bits:
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Follow up -"etendue" is effectively a measure of optical throughput which correlates with how many objects can be detected per unit of time. It is the product of the effective area of the primary mirror (m^2) times the effective area of the sky that is covered (degrees^2). The LSST's sensors do not cover quite the full field of view, which likely accounts for the difference between the calculated value of 347 and the claimed value of 320.
From the Pan-STARRS site is this comparison on etendues:
USAF Linear 1.5
SDSS 6.0
CFHT 8.0
SUBARU 8.8
Pan-STARRS 60
(It lists LSST as 190, which is wrong.)
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
"It's full of stars!"
"No, John, that's just a grainy image."
"Oh. What about this one? Stars?"
"Grain again."
"... They're ALL grainy! These images are useless!"
"True, but we have MEGAPIXELS!"
Somehow I doubt the governments of the world would even have the tech to try to enforce the "unauthorized" part on "spaceships, doomsday stars and other prohibited devices" =)
Maybe he wants the bosses job.
In one of his short stories, (I believe) after a near miss by an earth grazing asteroid (sliced through the upper atmosphere over a major city), a very large (gigaton) bomb is detonated in earth's orbit in a position diametrically opposed to the earth. The resulting "flash" resulted in a radar pulse (remember that was Clarke's early training in WWII) that was used to illuminate all the objects in the solar system. This was recorded and catalogued.
Decades later, an extra-terrestrial signal is recorded from another star system. After a quick calculation, it is apparent that the aliens, upon detecting the flash of this giga-bomb, quickly responded with a reply aimed at our solar system.
Hi there- I know that the scientists are loath to use any form of lossy compression on what could be priceless scientific data but I just wanted to ask if you are using any compression. I mean, images of this sort should be ideally suited to some forms of compression (a simplistic example would be RLE); after all, there is a lot of "space" (yuk yuk :).
I used to work in digital cinema during the early trials and very prominent movie directors would often walk up to the projection screen, inches fom their face, looking for compression artifacts that could be caused by our servers (we used wavelets). They passed and now digital cinemas are everywhere in the world.
Unless the members of congress can point it at the bedroom of the hot girl that lives across the street.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
...when is Samsung going to launch the SHDTV with the 3.2GP "lookback" feature?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
World's Largest Digital Camera Project Passes Critical Milestone
I've passed a tiny 1mm stone - a milestone must've been sheer agony.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Sir Arthur may have proposed it, but he got the science badly wrong.
Not only would such a bomb not produce a flash (the flash is a product of the bomb's reactions with the atmosphere) or a radar pulse of any kind, but even if it did - it would have to be in the tens or hundreds of gigatons to exceed the illumination available from the sun, and would only be useful for 1 AU or so from the bomb.