28-Megapixel Camera to Monitor the Night Sky

StupendousMan writes "Scientists at Sonneberg Observatory in Germany will start monitoring the sky every clear night (starting in October), using a curious combination: a 28-Megapixel CCD camera behind a 30-mm f/3.5 fisheye lens. As the first light test images show, the device can record nearly the full sky down to ninth magnitude (about 20 times fainter than the naked eye limit) every 5 minutes. The goal is to create a permanent record of bright objects, which could be used to discover comets and novae."

Re:Color

[dmatos]

Well, having colour would mean they would need a grid of filters, and then do some interpretation between pixels to guess at what the colour level there would be. In other words, if the grid looked like:

G B G R...

R G B G...

Which are Green, Blue, and Red sensitive pixels (a fairly standard pattern), then there would be no measure of how intense the blue light was on a green pixel, or vice versa. Some extrapolation would be required, and you would essentially be reducing the effective number of pixels on your device. My suspicion is that they wanted max resolution, and weren't overly concerned with putting pretty pictures on the net for us to gawk at, like Hubble can do.

On another note, who else thinks that this device has 2-3 dead pixel columns? Note the vertical black lines on the full-sky pictures. I'd be a little upset if I bought one of these babies (for $$$ probably) and ended up with dead columns.