World’s largest digital camera
World’s largest digital camera
The world’s largest and most advanced digital camera has
been installed on the Pan-STARRS-1 (PS1) telescope on Haleakala,
Maui.
“This is a truly giant instrument,” explained astronomer John Tonry, who led the team that developed the new camera. “It allows us to measure the brightness of the sky in 1.4 billion places simultaneously. We get an image that is 38,000 by 38,000 pixels in size, or about 200 times larger than you get in a high-end consumer digital camera. It’s also extremely sensitive: in a typical observation we will be able to detect stars that are 10 million times fainter than can be seen with the naked human eye.”
The silicon chips at the heart of the camera were developed in collaboration with Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They contain advanced circuitry that makes instantaneous corrections for any image shake caused by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The image area, which is about 16 inches (40 cm) across, contains 60 identical silicon chips, each of which contains 64 independent imaging circuits. Splitting the image area into about 4,000 separate regions in this way has three advantages: data can be recorded more quickly, “dazzling” of the image by a very bright star is confined to a small region, and any defects in the chips only affect only a small part of the image area.
Wow!
“This is a truly giant instrument,” explained astronomer John Tonry, who led the team that developed the new camera. “It allows us to measure the brightness of the sky in 1.4 billion places simultaneously. We get an image that is 38,000 by 38,000 pixels in size, or about 200 times larger than you get in a high-end consumer digital camera. It’s also extremely sensitive: in a typical observation we will be able to detect stars that are 10 million times fainter than can be seen with the naked human eye.”
The silicon chips at the heart of the camera were developed in collaboration with Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They contain advanced circuitry that makes instantaneous corrections for any image shake caused by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The image area, which is about 16 inches (40 cm) across, contains 60 identical silicon chips, each of which contains 64 independent imaging circuits. Splitting the image area into about 4,000 separate regions in this way has three advantages: data can be recorded more quickly, “dazzling” of the image by a very bright star is confined to a small region, and any defects in the chips only affect only a small part of the image area.
Wow!
Posted: Thu - September 6, 2007 at 09:50 AM