The World’s Largest and Most Powerful Camera 3.2-Gigapixel Sky Photos

Hi All

A new camera to picture the night sky.

3.2 Gigapixel Camera

From the link

The camera is scheduled to begin capturing photos and videos of the night sky in 2022 from the Cherro Pachon mountain in Chile. Over a 10 year period, it will capture more than 800 15-second exposure photos of the sky on a nightly basis, with each exposure covering 49 times more sky area than the moon.

At this rate, the camera will photograph the entire visible sky twice a week. A whopping 6 petabytes of data will be recorded every year by the camera, allowing researchers to gain a better understanding of our universe.

To give you an idea of size

petapixel.com...

This should produce some real interesting images.

wmd.

Ohh man, the lenses in that thing would give Carl Zeiss i chub for sure.

I thought the Nokia 40mp imaging sensor was bad ass.

S&F

wrong thread

You know what would be super sweet?

if they would put one of these cameras on a rocket and super hi res photographed the moon. There's some stuff up there I'd like a closer, hi def, view of...

a reply to: wmd_2008

800 pics and that's it?
No more?
What's it doing the rest of the time?

a reply to: Daalder
800 pics per night. There will be some exposure and processing/storage time for each image. Also aiming for each image, calibration, filter changes, etc. Still, around 100 images per hour is pretty impressive.

Given the darkness of space, excluding a few objects like the Sun, Moon and Earth, it's going to need a long exposure for every frame at night. With 86400 seconds/day (24*60*60), only half that time is usable. So that's 50 seconds a frame. My guess is that would be for the combined exposure and transfer to data storage. 32 Gigapixels with 16-bits/32-bits per pixel channel for monochrome white light, perhaps even more if it is multi-spectral with red, infra-red, green, blue, ultra-violet channels, is going to be 64 Gigabytes or more of data. Just a few hundred frames would squash out a single Terabyte hard drive, so I guess the data is going to be piped directly into a super-computer to be processed.

originally posted by: myartisstrong
You know what would be super sweet?

if they would put one of these cameras on a rocket and super hi res photographed the moon. There's some stuff up there I'd like a closer, hi def, view of...

a reply to: wmd_2008

We already have the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, covering the Moon at 0.5 m/pixel, with some images down to 0.25 m/pixel. Perhaps, one day, there will be a more powerful camera orbiting the Moon than the LRO, but the mega camera talked about in this thread would probably be impossible to operate in space, due to the immense amount of data produced and needing a transfer to earth.

originally posted by: myartisstrong
You know what would be super sweet?

if they would put one of these cameras on a rocket and super hi res photographed the moon. There's some stuff up there I'd like a closer, hi def, view of...

a reply to: wmd_2008

They have the LRO pictures 25-50cm per pixel!!!

originally posted by: Daalder
800 pics and that's it?
No more?
What's it doing the rest of the time?

Read understand then consider before you type!