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New Wide-Angle Telescope to Capture Night Sky

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sat May 20, 2006 02:34 PM
from the storage-nightmare dept.
Space Technology
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."
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  • UFO'S (Score:4, Funny)

    by ThePopeLayton (868042) on Saturday May 20 2006, @02:36PM (#15373002)
    Finally equipment good enought to catch the UFO's in action!!!

  • Holy Storage Area Network Batman! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Limburgher (523006) on Saturday May 20 2006, @02:36PM (#15373004) Homepage Journal
    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?

    • easy (Score:5, Funny)

      by commodoresloat (172735) * on Saturday May 20 2006, @02:47PM (#15373041) Homepage
      They'll put up a few bittorrent files and name them "Jenna Jameson porn XXX" and such.
    • Honestly they have no clue. They are really counting on Moore's law to continue up to the point they go online. The data pipeline does not exists today, nor does the storage this data set will require - to say nothing of the amount of space required to run the search requests of every single astronomer in the world who may be inetrested in the data set this thing will produce. Honsetly it is a great instrument, it is just the folks behind it are really, really depending on not hitting a downswing in tech

      • Re:Holy Storage Area Network Batman! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Rakishi (759894) on Saturday May 20 2006, @04:33PM (#15373377)
        Particle accelerator experiments seem to regularly result in data from 10 to 100 terabytes. The Stanford Linear Accelerator has a db of over 800 terabytes and I believe it didn't cost too much to set up (not to mention I doubt it's exactly cutting edge anymore if it ever was), so such large data sets are already in use. Given that this data will be mostly black space and much of the rest will not change unexpectadly over time compression will make it a small problem in comparison to the onces I already listed.
      • That's okay, based on the growth of Windows, Windows Forever+1 (the version following Vista) should boast disk requirements of 500GB just for the operating system if you plot out the growth curve. Don't worry, Microsoft will be prompting hard disk manufacturers to keep push disk capacities higher at faster rates. The thing that WILL suck though is the amount of time defrag.exe will take to complete. Ouch!

        This cheap shot was made possible by that evil tool of the debil, Mozilla Firefox instead of the nice

    • Re:Holy Storage Area Network Batman! (Score:4, Funny)

      by value_added (719364) on Saturday May 20 2006, @02:56PM (#15373065)
      I'd suggest multipart .RAR archives, and have someone generate a new NFO file every 3 days.
    • They are piping everything to /dev/null. It's also quite fast.
  • Great, So they've got a 3 Gigapixel camera. Always trying to one-up me, I see.

  • lots of questions ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by warrior_s (881715) <kindle3@ g m a i l .com> on Saturday May 20 2006, @02:50PM (#15373049) Homepage Journal
    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 ?

    • Re:lots of questions ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 20 2006, @03:01PM (#15373079)
      Chile doesn't need to have their own supercomputers. The people funding it (RTFA) can ship them in. While Chile is one of the more prosperous South American countries, this is not Chile's project, and is probably only involved because they probably have the right site for the observatory.
    • Does Chile have some state of art suprcomputers to achieve this...

      No, they plan on using some tin cans and a string and the guys are just going to relay the 0's and 1's off to a country with actual electricity and stuff.

      Please go read a little about Chile. They don't live in the dark ages there. It's actually a pretty modern country and hosts to some of the biggest telescopes in the world. Just because they have clean air doesn't make them Neanderthals.
    • here's a background paper on the "data challenge" - http://www.lsst.org/Project/docs/data-challenge.pd f [lsst.org]

  • billion: 10^9 or 10^12 ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Janek Kozicki (722688) on Saturday May 20 2006, @03:00PM (#15373076) Journal
    Ok, so how do i know if the submitter is native english speaker or not? According to wikipedia, billion [wikipedia.org] - 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 :(
  • 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, wh

    • Re:Prioritize our needs (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The short answer is, yes, we do. The other 8m+ class telescopes all have tiny fields of view. They are designed to stare for a long time at a fixed point in the sky to take 'deep' exposures. The LSST is designed to do survey work to measure weak lensing of galaxies. That requires looking at a large region of sky (so you can get as many galaxies as possible), and also requires the telescope to be a big 'light bucket' so the signal to noise in the individual pixels is good enough.

      The reason they are doing

        • Narrow? (Score:4, Informative)

          by jpflip (670957) on Saturday May 20 2006, @04:27PM (#15373365)
          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!

    • Re:Prioritize our needs (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Saturday May 20 2006, @03:46PM (#15373235) Homepage Journal
      The ability to scan the entire sky in high resolution in one go WILL be a benefit to every other telescope on earth.

      As soon as this thing detects anything strange, the other specific scopes can be aimed in that direction.

      Without this, its blind luck whether an event will be witnessed.
    • I personally do not feel that another 8m class telescope is what the community needs.
      Are you suggesting that there are ways to spend 300 millon in Chile that might somehow better serve the community? At first I thought maybe schools or infrastructure might be better places for the cash, but after reading up on Chile in the World Factbook http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos / ci.html [cia.gov] I think that some high end scientific spending is quite appropriate. Now should that money come from US taxpay

  • use distributed telescope arrays (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 20 2006, @03:20PM (#15373142)
    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.
    • first, on the whole political thing:

      the competition in astronomy is fierce. there's a fixed amount of money and a pile of good projects. there's a big peer-review process that evaluates possible projects and gives priorities. then the nsf goes round looking for dead wood it can hack away so that there's money for the best projects. no-one is complacent - i work at ctio and everyone there was assuming that they were going to lose their jobs. and because lsst won't really kick in for a few years, we may still be laid off before then (even though we're all working like crazy on related projects). this isn't a bunch of "has beens" making life easy for themselves - it's a vicious, competitive world where only projects that really stand a good chance of changing astronomy make it.

      second, the technology choice:

      if you are talking about synthetic apertures (like radio telescopes) then no - you cannot link optical telescopes together state-wide. you can control them in parallel, sure, but you cannot combine the data in the same way as radio telescopes. it's way beyond our technical ability. so if there is no synthetic aperture, what's the advantage in spreading them around? especially when world class telescope sites with existing support are very rare. it makes most sense to put one telescope on the top of a mountain in a chilean desert.

      and don't think you can re-use any old telescope. the structural engineering of this thing is going to be brutal - to optimize throughput the slews (moving to a new position on the sky) are going to be way faster than anything currently out there. that's one reason the site decision had to be made early - they need to know what they're building this on just to control the vibration levels!

      there is a competing project, called pan-stars, which has a group of co-located telescopes. the advantage of that approach is largely political - you can build one cheaply and then look for more funding. but if you do the maths - and this is well understood engineering/optics/statistics, the answer is clear - the lsst solution comes out on top.

      oh, and it's not old news either; the press conference anouncing that this was going to chile was held in the room next to my office a few days ago.
      • Just sign up for a free account and you can post starting at +1. When you've made a dozen or so +5 comments you'll be able to post starting at +2 so more people see you to start with.

        I like your idea, but I wonder how easy it would be for someone to take a photo that matches the characteristics of the other photos from the array, given that they have different equipment.

        The complexity of the data processing makes me wonder how much of a supercomputer they need along with how they are going to store this dat
  • 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?

  • Imagine (Score:4, Funny)

    by From A Far Away Land (930780) on Saturday May 20 2006, @03:59PM (#15373282) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • This sounds like somebody fishing for a little goverment money. Like watching for 'near earth' satilites that can be seen if you have wide angle coverage, and good depth.

  • Copy cats (Score:3, Interesting)

    by p_trekkie (597206) on Saturday May 20 2006, @05:18PM (#15373510) Homepage
    This is truly not innovative at all and just copying someone else's idea. PAN-STARRS [hawaii.edu] 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.

    • Re:Copy cats (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pnot (96038)
      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.

      Gosh, sounds like someone's got a case of gigapixel envy! As a matter of fact, this telescope will be at a latitude of thirty degrees south [www.aei.ca], (cf. Hawaii's twenty degrees north [netstate.com]) -- hardly the "very southern hemisphere".

      Take it easy; as you point out, the Hawaii telescope will be online sooner, but the Chile one will h

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by SonicSpike (242293) on Saturday May 20 2006, @06:31PM (#15373684) Homepage Journal
    the paparazzi will be using it to view J-Lo's ass!

  • 30 new stars discovered! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Schraegstrichpunkt (931443) on Saturday May 20 2006, @09:08PM (#15374009) Homepage
    "... oh wait, those are just dead pixels. Sorry; Our bad."

    • Re:30 terabytes of data per night (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dr_LHA (30754) on Saturday May 20 2006, @03:46PM (#15373236) Homepage
      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.
      • "no astronomer uses forth these days"?? http://forth.gsfc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
        • 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,
      • 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. ;)

    • Re:30 terabytes of data per night (Score:5, Informative)

      by RogerWilco (99615) on Saturday May 20 2006, @04:21PM (#15373353) Homepage Journal
      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 :-)
      • I was looking to see if anyone talked about LOFAR. And lo and behold, I found one.

        30TB is a baby game compared to the LOFAR guys (ok, it's a rather "apple and orange" comparison, I must admit).
    • > you're worrying about edge effects then that equipment must be kind of
      > sh*tty...no?

      We're talking about an 8 + METER aperture here pulling down over 4 degrees of sky. That is a ~~~seriously~~~ fast and wide angle lens. If you could buy this for your Canon or Nikon, it would be like (if my calculations are correct) a 400mm f/0.05 lens.

      Edge effects and dealing with them must have been a whopper of an optical design challenge. Wide angle lenses can have considerable distortion and tendency towards othe
        • 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.

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