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Graphics Software Science

Fermilab Builds 500-Megapixel Camera 180

Posted by simoniker from the quite-large dept.
heyitsme writes "Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, is part of a collaboration on an experiment to measure the properties of dark energy. The Dark Energy Survey would measure the history of the expansion rate of the universe more precisely than ever before, using the largest camera ever built with Charge Coupled Devices (CCD). The 500 megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) would be placed on an existing 4-meter telescope located in north-central Chile at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The DECam together with the CTIO 4-meter telescope will allow for a survey of 15 percent of the sky to light levels faint enough to measure the colors of galaxies at redshift one."
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Fermilab Builds 500-Megapixel Camera More

Fermilab Builds 500-Megapixel Camera

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  • Filesize? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FSWKU ( 551325 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @02:43AM (#9264677)
    I would hate to see how much space one frame from this thing takes up...

    • Re:Filesize? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 27, 2004 @02:55AM (#9264718)
      The detector actually contains roughly 503,316,480 raw pixels, this amounts to slightly less than 500,000,000 effective pixels after initial processing.

      The data will, of course, be stored directly to a large SAN storage system, probably from EMC or Hitachi.

      The detector should generate single frame images of roughly 1.7G prior to post-processing, and roughly 700M single-frame image files after processing to TIFF or PNG format.

      • cost of storage (Score:2, Interesting)

        by pablo_max ( 626328 )
        That actually would not cost to much more to store when compared to the cost of getting your film done at a 1 hour photo.
        Considering I payed 10 bucks for a 50 pack of cd's which is about normal. So * that by 700 meg and /by 1.7gig and you've got 20.5 pictures @ 49 cents a pic.Now to develope a single 25 picture roll of kodak APS film is 10.00 (9.99 actually). so thats 40 cents a print.
        Yes I know it would be hard to break the image between three disks but im just saying cost wise its not much at all.

      • Re:Filesize? (Score:3, Informative)

        by V_M_Smith ( 186361 )
        TIFF or PNG? Who in the world uses anything other than FITS for astronomical images?

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Filesize? (Score:1, Informative)

      by BWJones ( 18351 ) *
      Although the article does say 500 megapixel, a simple calculation could answer your question. The CCD is composed of elements giving it a pixel array of 180k X 240k pixels giving us 28800000000 pixels! (Assuming each pixel holds one grey value in a 16 bit image ) Working from 16 bits/pixel and 8 bits/byte, we are looking at 2 bytes per pixel. So 2 bytes * 28800000000 pixels gives us 57600000000 bytes or almost 54 GB/image!

      If you were to take multispectral or even RGB images, one would multiply the file
      • For the new generation of CCDs, data transfer is a big problem (especially since many telescopes are in rather isolated locations -- high in the Chilean mountains, for example.) I have heard that some sites are planning a huge SneakerNet (or, rather, JumboNet? CessnaNet?) and hoping to fly out stacks of DAT tapes of the unreduced data back "home."

        • Re:Filesize? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:23AM (#9264816) Homepage Journal
          I have heard that some sites are planning a huge SneakerNet (or, rather, JumboNet? CessnaNet?) and hoping to fly out stacks of DAT tapes of the unreduced data back "home."

          So, we here in academia are a bit spoiled in terms of bandwidth. However, companies and some in academics have to pay for lots of bits and bytes and are thus interested in costs to move these sorts of data. I was talking with Jim Gray a couple of weeks ago and he was telling me that a recent study revealed some of the true costs of moving lots of data. For instance: Lets say you are trying to move a terabyte of data from London to Los Angeles. It turns out it is cheaper (and faster) to put it on magnetic storage and fly it from London to Los Angeles than it is to try and move it over the Internet.

          • That's one way to have an Internet connection.
            Airplane full of CDs.
            High bandwidth.
            High latency.

          • Re:Filesize? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by BiggerIsBetter ( 682164 )
            I believe that, but I've always had trouble with the cost of moving data around the Internet. I mean, it's not like fibre optic cable wears out faster the more bits you push through it. It seems to be more about supply/demand than any "real" factors.

          • Re:Filesize? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by silas_moeckel ( 234313 )
            I call BS, I can get a gigabit pipe in any major city for 10k a month. Assuming I just have two points I need to move data to thats 20k a month and I'm staying on the same backbone provider so I have contractual levverage is I cant get the throughput inside the one backbone. I can move 1TB is 8000+ seconds aka less than 3 hours. It takes nearly a day to get from LA to London as well with a ticket cost of what 2k on expedia booked a month out for an overnight trip. If you have to move a TB a day thats 6

            • Re:Filesize? (Score:3, Insightful)

              by thedillybar ( 677116 )
              If you have to move a TB a day

              Well, sure. But what if you only need to move 1 TB? On 1 day?

              • If it's a one off then it's a question of what you have at hand. If you have a 5k tape drive at each end and a pile of tapes that costs another grand use that. If you have a pile of DVD-RW's use that. This was in relation to moving data from a telescope I would hope they are moving data from every nights or at least most nights work.

          • Re:Filesize? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Roger W Moore ( 538166 )
            It turns out it is cheaper (and faster) to put it on magnetic storage and fly it from London to Los Angeles than it is to try and move it over the Internet.

            Until you remember that you have to pay someone to feed the hundreds of tapes into drives to copy the data to disk and that you'd have to buy and run well over 10 drives in order to get the bandwidth of a 10Gbit connection and a lot more into order to beat that bandwidth. I think if you worked out the cost and time disk-to-disk the result would be more

        • Re:Filesize? (Score:2, Informative)

          by hildaur ( 86126 )
          In fact, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey [sdss.org] (in which Fermilab also plays a major role) transfers its imaging data from the the observatory [nmsu.edu] to Fermilab (where it is reduced) by FedExing DLT tapes. I do not know what it planned for the DEC.

      • Re:Filesize? (Score:5, Informative)

        by hyc ( 241590 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:15AM (#9264789) Homepage Journal
        Interesting, the numbers you show don't appear anywhere in the article. Instead, I see:
        At the heart of the DECam are 60 rectangular (2k x 4k) CCDs, each with 8 million 15-micron pixels. The CCDs, developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, are over five times more sensitive at near-infrared wavelengths than conventional CCDs currently used for astronomy.
        60 CCDs at 8 million pixels each for a total of only 480 million pixels. There's no mention of color filtration so grayscale is a safe assumption. There's also no mention of resolution but 16 bits sounds good as a guess.

        So 960 million bytes per frame, which is only 915.5MB (1M = 2^20).

        • Re:Filesize? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Hittite Creosote ( 535397 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @04:21AM (#9264981)
          There's no mention of color filtration so grayscale is a safe assumption.

          Not in the article, but in their submission of proposal to Fermilab PAC [fnal.gov], they state

          The total number of images over all bandpasses is 35.
          So, not more data per image, just more images.
          • Nice link.

            Chapter 4 covers the data acquisition requirements in detail. The detector is composed of 60 CCDs with the following characteristics:

            Resolution: 2048x4096
            Digitization Rate 240 khz
            Exposure Time: 17.5s
            Image Size: 1 gigabyte.
            Image Data Rate: 10 MB/s. (1 image per 100s)

            From those calculations, we see that each pixel is sampled with 1024 bits, or 128 bytes. It's rather more sensitive than most CCDs. (And that's a monochrome image. They will sample at different wavelengths--necessary, perhaps, for r
        • (S)he assumed that 2k meant 2048 and 4k meant 4096. So both sets of numbers came from the same source and the difference comes from confusion over what 'k' means.
          • Yes, but 2048*4096*60 still only comes out to 503316480 (480M pixels, instead of 480 million). Not the "28800000000 pixels" that BWJones came up with. There is no 180k x 240k anywhere in the article, that's what I was having a problem with.

            A CCD that produced a single frame of 54GB would be somewhat impractical; you would need that much RAM to capture a single image and buffer it for writing to disk/tape. You could read it back in pieces for processing, of course...

      • Re:Filesize? (Score:4, Informative)

        by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:15AM (#9264792) Homepage Journal
        Ummmm......I think it is too late and past my bed time. A quick rechecking of the numbers reveals a total of 960000000 bytes for each image in a 4800000000 pixel array giving us a much more manageable total of approx .9GB/image in raw form (again, assuming a 16 bit image).

      • wait wait wait...

        A 500megapixel camera has 500,000,000 pixels, not 28,800,000,000!!!!!

        So, its actually closer to 1GB than 54GB.

        -Bill
    • a lot, but the pictures of "dark energy" can be compressed to this: "0,500000000"

  • I'm glad (Score:5, Funny)

    by toddhunter ( 659837 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @02:47AM (#9264685)
    That they were able to save money by using an existing telescope.
    Because the compact flash cards for this thing cannot be cheap.

    • Re:I'm glad (Score:2, Informative)

      by jensen404 ( 717086 )
      You could fit a few pictures on this 12GB CF:
      http://www.dpreview.com/news/0405/04052601pre tec12 gb.asp

      Only $14,900
  • Wow... 500 megs.. Niceeeee.

    I want one of these, too bad I just bought a new nikon d70. Its almost as good as having 500 megspx.
    • I want one of these, too bad I just bought a new nikon d70. Its almost as good as having 500 megspx.

      I think you mean your Nikon is almost as good as having 500 millipixels ;-)
    • too bad I just bought a new nikon d70. Its almost as good as having 500 megspx

      Er... what? In terms of sheer performance the Nikon d70 is 6 megapixels isn't it? That's like saying 'Ooh, the new Porsche 911 Turbo S is nice, but I just bought a shopping trolley, it's almost as good'.

      OK, the Nikon d70 is a bit more portable than a 500megapixel camera attached to a 4 metre telescope, but in terms of impressing with numbers...

      • If I bought my girlfriend one of these, she wouldn't be too impressed since the portability is low.

        OTOH, she said that if I bought her a D70, she'd be my slave for a week.

        Winner: D70.

  • but (Score:2, Funny)

    by trs9000 ( 73898 )
    cool but does it fit in my pocket?
    im going to japan soon and i need a good camera......

    • Re:but (Score:3, Funny)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 )
      im going to japan soon and i need a good camera......
      Buy one there on the cheap :)
      • im going to japan soon and i need a good camera......

        Buy one there on the cheap :)

        Been to Japan; learned something: You can't get Product X cheaper in Japan than in the west. The plus is that you get newer versions/models much sooner there than the west.

    • Re:but (Score:5, Funny)

      by supergiovane ( 606385 ) <<arturo.digioia> <at> <ing.unitn.it>> on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:46AM (#9264879)
      I dont't know that, but I heard that it has quite good lenses and an amazing zoom. You really don't need to go to Japan with it: you can take detailed photos of Japan directly from home!
    • Last time I drove by some highschools, I located some pockets that could fit rhode island...

      Probably off topic, but if you need a good camera, AND going to japan - it might be a wild thought and all, but maybe you should consider buying one in japan where most of the major camera manufactures are based...

      (in case you actually do this: haggle the yodobashi-camera guys. more likely than not, they WILL negociate)
    • Hopefully, the camera you get will be smaller and more efficient...

      Right now this camera probably sits in a LN2 cooled dewar about the size of an oil drum. Good luck taking spontaneous candids with it! :)

  • 500 megapixel?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fodi ( 452415 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @02:49AM (#9264698)
    I dont EVER want to be photographed in that much detail !!
  • I saw this headline and was like, whoa, I could have sworn there was an article about this yesterday. But this one is much cooler than yesterday's enormously high-resolution camera--it's in space. Pretty good progress for 24 hours.
  • in Photoshop, it be a sight to behold. Or even better, embed one of these pics in a pdf file and EMAIL it to a friend. Ah yes good times for admins, systems, and users everywhere to enjoy!

  • Just Think... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by gr3g ( 119302 )
    The digital zoom on that would be immense. You could take a picture in a city environment and just spend the next couple of days looking at everything you would miss at first glance. Kind of creepy, but the "neat!" factor overwhelms here.

    • Re:Just Think... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zog The Undeniable ( 632031 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:09AM (#9264761)
      Probably not. Digital zoom is useless because it just magnifies part of the picture without increasing resolution. It may be useful for video (especially if the CCD has a higher resolution than TV) but it's essentially a "marketing feature" for still photography.

      Anyway, with 500MP you're going to be severely limited by the resolving power of the lens. It's quite difficult to get even 100 line pairs per mm with the best 35mm photographic lenses (lenses for larger formats tend to be much worse because it's harder to maintain accuracy over a large glass area, plus it's not as necessary with lower enlargement factors). A 500MP sensor needs a pretty exceptional telescope in front of it.

      • Re:Just Think... (Score:2, Informative)

        by fabs64 ( 657132 )
        ... if the camera is 500MP then yes the digital zoom would in fact be useful, being that the resolution is so massive you can keep zooming in and zooming in for a very long time before there's any noticable degradation in image quality (assuming a perfect lense etc here which is not possible). what i'm pretty sure he meant was, say take a photo from 200m above a busy city st, and u could sit there for hours and hours just zooming in on that photo looking at cracks in the sidewalk or the hairs on peoples he

        • Re:Just Think... (Score:3, Informative)

          by neurojab ( 15737 )
          >youu can keep zooming in and zooming in for a very long time before there's any noticable degradation

          I think a better way to put it would be that here is that if you want a smaller image( less information) you can selectively crop it out. If you're targeting 1-2 megapixels final size, you could be quite selective in finding the perfect picture in a 500 megapixel image.

          Digital "zoom" is badly named because it's not really a zoom, it's a crop, followed by a resample. In practice most people find tha

      • Re:Just Think... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by baritono ( 781506 )
        Keep in mind, however, that this is going to be used with a reflector telescope. And that this telescope has a 4-meter aperture. The primary mirror in a telescope of this size costs millions of dollars, and is machined to an incredibly precise level of accuracy. The question is, when do we get parabolic reflector handheld digicams?

      • Re:Just Think... (Score:2, Informative)

        by troon ( 724114 )

        Not really. If you're looking for a decent A4 print, you need at least 5MP. A raw image from this beast contains 100 of those images, so you could use "digital zoom" (actually, just cropping) to concentrate on specific parts of the image at perfectly acceptable resolution.

        You're right about the general uselessness of digital zoom [plus.com] on low-end digicams, but this is a different beast.

  • why you need 500 Mpx (Score:5, Informative)

    by sdedeo ( 683762 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @02:59AM (#9264735) Homepage Journal
    (Not an expert, they're all fast asleep right now.)

    One of the things Fermilab is trying to do is get a measurement of the so called weak lensing effect. Matter distorts spacetime, and light is thus bent as it passes nearby a big cluster. This is gravitational lensing.

    Famously, it is seen as "strong" lensing -- when the source is very close on the sky to the cluster, and the light gets bent enough that there are multiple images. Nobody really believed it could happen, but then in the last decade or so it's become an accepted and popular thing to play with and observe.

    Weak lensing is when there are no multiple images, and instead only a slight distortion. Much harder to see and measure -- you basically look for a whole bunch of galaxies that are slightly distorted.

    That means you need a very wide field of view -- to get enough galaxies quickly enough -- but also a very good resolution -- to be able to measure the slight distortions. Hence the need for such an insane[ly cool] device.

    Why go through all this trouble? Well, weak lensing is one of the view ways to measure all the matter in the universe on very large scales. Because nearly all the matter is supposed to be invisible, in the past people have used various "tracers" that we can see. But there's a huge amount of debate as to how good the various tracers are, and, of course, you need a direct measurement to be sure you're not off in la-la land.

    Weak lensing measures it all because all matter, regardless of how bright it is, bends spacetime in the same fashion. So, if you can get a good weak lensing measurement, you can theoretically create an unbiased map of the matter distribution. No need to cross your fingers and hope that some tracer is behaving properly.

    It all fits into dark energy because dark energy is supposed to alter the extent to which matter can cluster (roughly speaking, dark energy behaves like antigravity, and pushes things apart, stopping them from falling together.)

    Of course, weak lensing is just one of the things this guy is meant to do -- there are lots of other neat things that hopefully someone more awake than I can describe.
    • This critter is so cool it's almost scary... I'm waiting for the astronomer to say cheese, and after accounting for weak gravitational lensing we get a picture of God smiling back!

      One of the other things this big camera will do, after it get's a baseline for the original matter density once the universe became transparent to radiation, will be to look at changes in the matter density over time. With this we'll have a very direct measurement of the space between cosmic structures over time and an excellen

  • Finally!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eberlin ( 570874 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:10AM (#9264768) Homepage
    Finally something that has higher system requirements than Longhorn!!!

  • I bet.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by platypibri ( 762478 ) <platypibri@@@gmail...com> on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:12AM (#9264774) Homepage Journal
    Even at this level of digital imaging, it has a weak, useless flash, intolerable low light noise, and sucks batteries in no time. Actually, I'm really looking forward to seeing the images this thing captures
  • My Scanner can scan at 5mgpx per sq inch. So if you just take a normal picture big enough, and scan it... It would be about the same.

    It would be a hell of a lot cheaper, seeing is how my scanner was 100$. This 500mgpx camera is probably a big on the pricy side... not to mention what it is attached to.
    • Your "normal" 35mm wouldn't be anywhere near the resolution required.
    • Unfortunately, your scanner lacks the light gathering ability of a 4 Meter telescope or we'd be set!
    • Hmm.. Attach a pair of 5$ binoculars to your 106$ scanner and you have your personal deep-space telescope!
      Now attach that to a $1 paper airplane and you have DIY Hubble! yay!
      total cost: 106$
      Makes you wonder how NASA managed to spend
      so much on Hubble!

    • My Scanner can scan at 5mgpx per sq inch. So if you just take a normal picture big enough, and scan it... It would be about the same.

      And that normal _big_ picture you are talking should be 100*100 inch with resolution of 5MDPI at least. Now, how did you think to take the picture and more importantly, how to process (like printing) it for scanning that with your scanner.

      Yes, you still need something like that camera.

      -AZi

  • DECam? (Score:2, Funny)

    by spare.dave ( 678439 )
    Time to dig up the old Digital icon?

  • CCD? (Score:2)

    by Pflipp ( 130638 )
    And here I was thinking that CCD technology was inferior to CMOS and that other thingy, and that the actual sample rate is only half or somethingabout of the given number of Megapixels?

    Could be wrong, though, having a hard time finding my way to the megapixel forest.

    • Re:CCD? (Score:4, Informative)

      by CyberBill ( 526285 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @04:17AM (#9264969)
      CMOS is cheaper and can transfer the image faster off of the chip, but CCDs offer lower dark noise and lower reading noise, which means that your pictures are clearer and more scientifically usuable. CCDs are also INCREDIBLY more sensitive than CMOS, with the newer chips able to get upwards of 85% efficiency.

      -Bill
    • It's not surprising... there's so dang much hype it's hard to separate the pepper from the fly shit. So here are some basic threads regarding imaging devices you're likely to find in consumer products.

      1. CCDs have been around longer and are slightly more advanced that CMOS imaging devices at the level of simple function.

      2. CMOS is less expensive on a price performance basis

      3. The new Foveon chip allows a single maskless imaging chip to image all three colors simultaneously (this means no interpolat

  • Nice piece of kit! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Paul Townend ( 185536 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:36AM (#9264856) Homepage
    The article mentions "The five-year DES hopes to generate about 100 terabytes of data" that will be released to the public at regular intervals....

    This kit is probably one example of why the world needs more 92 Tbs routers [slashdot.org]; sharing the data generated by this baby will probably be a task not unlike that faced by the Large Hadron Collider [web.cern.ch] at CERN. You're going to have to have a really nice architecture and set of protocols to be able to efficiently pass around these images - possibly this is where Grid Technology [globus.org] comes in to play....

    Of course, then you'll need something to actually process the images on! I guess Intel and AMD still have a rosy future ahead of them...

  • Nice, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bill_Royle ( 639563 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @03:36AM (#9264858)
    Is there Linux support for it?
    • and SATA compatible??
      I want to se the pics NOW

    • Re:Nice, but... (Score:3, Informative)

      by bobhagopian ( 681765 )
      Though parent is (+5, Funny), the answer to his question is most likely yes. In all the time I've spent in various physics research labs, I've never seen anything *but* Linux. The story would be different if the CCD was being launched (in which case it would probably run on a specially written variant of VAX). But the drivers/utilities for land-based devices are written almost exclusively by the scientists themselves (not engineers), and most of them stick with Linux.

      • RHIC isn't pure linux... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by caveat ( 26803 )
        i did some work at Brookhaven National Lab a while back; i hooked up with a cute chick who was into physics and got to slum around the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [bnl.gov] quite a bit (mostly the STAR detector, for those who care). i almost choked when i saw a win2k workstation humming away, but that was just the interface computer (there tend to be a lot of interns and such working, so a windows frontend is handy, cuts back the learning curve quite a bit). the rest of the lot was a hodgepodge of unix kit; the r
    • the telescope/instrument control systems are/will not be linux, as far as i know, but the data will be archived and reduced on linux (some reduction might also be on suns and max osx).

      i work at ctio, writing iraf [noao.edu] software for noao - iraf is multi-platform, but we develop on linux (currently red hat, about to move to fedora, although i also have it running in debian on my laptop - well, i did until yesterday, when i messed up a kernel recompile/install and lost linux completely (it's an x31, so i need to do
  • And just like the "scientists" used the FINITE Improbability Generator at parties to "simultaneously shift all the atoms in the hostesses undergarments 12 inches to the left", I'm dead-set certain there's some scientists out there thinking up "alternate uses" for this technology:

    Lower-Echelon-Science-Geek: "mmmm, high-resolution pr0n".

    from the womens toilets , no doubt, as even astronomical geeks don't get "any"

    And I know for absolute certain what all you (well, us) SlashDOTerS were thinking:

    How-T

  • Imagine a be... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ..autiful picture this thing can take.

    Oh, I can't take it! BEOWULF CLUSTER! There, I said it!

  • Taking a rule of thumb too far... (Score:4, Funny)

    by supercytro ( 527265 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @04:06AM (#9264938)
    [Person A]I told you before, megapixels don't matter... [Person B]But it's 500 Megapixels... [Person A]500 megapixels, 5 megapixels... it doesn't matter. Everyone knows that. It's common knowledge that megapixels is just a marketing trick. [Person B]But... [Person A]Look I read slashdot and everyone says the same. [Person B]ok...
    • Indeed, the more pixels, the smaller the pixels. And the less light they capture.

      But you should read the article : we talk about a one-halfmeter-diameter DECam , so the pixels (15-micron) arent that small as in your pocket camera ;-)
      quote:

      At the heart of the DECam are 60 rectangular (2k x 4k) CCDs, each with 8 million 15-micron pixels. The CCDs, developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, are over five times more sensitive at near-infrared wavelengths than conventional CCDs currently used for ast

  • But I thought (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    5 Megapixels would be enough for anyone?

  • Meanwhile, in telescope control (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 27, 2004 @04:18AM (#9264970)
    Scientist: Shouldn't the telescope be pointing into
    deep space rather than at that satellite with the
    big mirror on it?
    NRO guy: Nah, this is good.
  • ...It's been reported that Nikon is changing their company's logo from their traditional red to a beautiful shade of Green (with envy).

  • Search for Dark Energy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @09:04AM (#9265747)
    How can they tell a picture of dark energy apart from a picture where they just forgot to take the lens cap off?

  • If you build it ... they will come.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by telstar ( 236404 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @09:14AM (#9265806)
    Didn't take long for somebody to come up with a use for that Cisco router...

  • they should wait (Score:4, Funny)

    by lordmoose ( 696738 ) * on Thursday May 27, 2004 @09:34AM (#9265918) Journal
    I heard that the 502 mega-pixel camera is coming out in six months.

  • high res images are not new (Score:4, Informative)

    by vijayiyer ( 728590 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @09:47AM (#9266012)
    There seems to be a lot of interest all of a sudden on slashdot on super high res images (yesterday there was an article on a large film camera which was by no means revolutionary or record setting). It's really not that cutting edge. If you go to www.betterlight.com, they're releasing a 4x5 back capable of 10200x13800 pixels soon, and already have one available that's about 100 Mpixel. Granted, these are slow, but they've been available for a long time and are used daily by product photographers. I shoot 4x5 myself on film and make 550 MB scans. It's relatively cheap and very high res.

  • Astroid Hunter? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BurritoJ ( 75275 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @10:04AM (#9266145)
    So, if this thing can see 15% of the sky at a shot, can it be used to look for incoming 'Global Killers?'
  • ...how to combine it with these previous projects:

    Hmmm...

  • Dark matter in far away galaxies... (Score:3, Funny)

    by new death barbie ( 240326 ) on Thursday May 27, 2004 @10:08AM (#9266194)

    so... what kind of flash do I need?

  • Damn (Score:2, Funny)

    by hkb ( 777908 )
    I was expecting red shift .5 capabilities...
  • When I first read the thing I thought it read
    500-Megaton as in h-bomb.
  • Dark matter, dark energy... what about dark information? This kind of information is experienced by humans as "nemory": events that never happened, and are not remembered. It is estimated that the vast majority of information in Universe is "dark", and most memories are nemories. At the Borges Institute of Forking Paths, we are applying the science of schneidics to process the "queebs" of dark info as we explore the vaster Universe beyond our ken.
  • 700MB files is all? Well trim those down to 70MB thumbs and post a gallery link on slashdot.
  • This 2007 space telescope will observe a 100,000 stars of tiny region space for years to look for rare planetary eclipses of the parent star. They expect a couple hundred events based on best-guess statics of numbers of planets, orbital inclinations, sizes of planets and orbits, etc.

    Venus makes its "twice in a century" such eclipse of our Sun on June 8, 2004.

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