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Space Science

First 3,200 Megapixel Images Taken By World's Largest Digital Camera (interestingengineering.com) 59

Posted by BeauHD from the incredibly-detailed dept.
New submitter Crowchild Bob writes: The specific and intricate shape of the Romanesco plant is perfect as a testing ground for the new camera, which will be fitted into the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) in Chile. The 3,200 megapixel camera is set to uncover a huge amount of detail still unknown about astronomy, such as dark matter and dark energy. The plan for the VRO is to map out the sky by snapping pictures with the new digital camera every few nights for a decade. From moving and flashing phenomenon to billions of stars and galaxies, the camera will try and capture it all in precise detail. "We'll get very deep images of the whole sky. But almost more importantly, we'll get a time sequence," VRO director Steve Kahn told BBC. "We'll see which stars have changed in brightness, and anything that has moved through the sky like asteroids and comets," he continued.

The camera is put together at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S. It's made up of a 25 inch (64 cm)-wide focal plane and 189 individual sensors. One of the biggest challenges of the assembly project was putting it all together given the required precision and complex electronics. The first images ever taken with the camera were released on Tuesday and provided record-breaking detail of the broccoli plant.
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First 3,200 Megapixel Images Taken By World's Largest Digital Camera More

First 3,200 Megapixel Images Taken By World's Largest Digital Camera

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  • This will make George H. W. Bush spin in his grave [nytimes.com].

  • One of the biggest challenges of the assembly project was putting it all together given the required precision and complex electronics

    That and finding a large enough MicroSD card.

    • Re:Biggest challenge (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 ) on Thursday September 10, 2020 @05:24AM (#60491368) Homepage

      1TB microSD cards are now readily available. I can get the SanDisk Extreme PRO microSD cards direct from the Western Digital store (they brough SanDisk back in 2016) for 450GBP and the none PRO version for 280GBP. Given the write speed is the same on both versions I think I would go for the cheaper option. There are other purchasing options but I am super wary of buying large capacity SD cards, too many fake ones out there. Direct from the manufacture is a good choice.

      • Those are great options for super-HD broccoli images, but probably not so much for data you actually care about.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Say 32 bits per colour channel for RAW data, that's 38,400,000,000 bytes or 35.7GB. Benchmarking shows the Pro version gets around 190MB/sec write speed, so it would take over 3 minutes to save the image to that card.

        I imagine they use proper SSDs and 10G networks for this kind of thing.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jabuzz ( 182671 )

          I very much doubt that they are using SSD's for this sort of storage. It's just way to expensive. Besides you can peg a 10Gbps ethernet link with just 82 drives and have loads of headroom.

          I would imagine they are going with something like multiple DSS-G 260 with say16TB drives. Would get you about 5PB in a rack. So for a telescope system several of those, then chuck in couple of DSS-G 100 to hold your metadata (replicated of course).

  • Maybe now they should get to work on a lens of some sort.
    • No lens on this one, but a uniquely designed quintuple mirror (instead of the standard 2-mirror of most telescopes) so as to have a very large field (10deg). Source: I work on the project, I write the software for the 2 camera testers ! The mirror is currently being installed in Chile, but the camera is being assembled and tested at Stanford.

      • +1 thanks!

      • Still completely defeating the point of using a Romanesco given how blurry the result is. Taking pictures is fine, but don't communicate on it unless you're able to show the amazing resolution. This setup is not capable of that, aside from showing a few artifacts which most won't be able to appreciate. This is really bad PR.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dargaud ( 518470 )
          Well, I'm not privy to the setup for this image, but the real lens is not yet on the camera, so they probably used an SLR lens !!! I can ask.
          • based on the article they used a pinhole camera, no lens, just a box with a hole in the middle and illuminated the subject inside with some LEDs. But I do agree with GP, I was kind of disappointed by the blurriness. Using this to test the sensors is fine, but the article seems to make so much fanfare about the broccoli being a fractal that not being able to zoom in with sharp detail is a bummer.

      • Strangely enough, the 9/8 article on the slac.stanford.edu site has an image showing the lenses, shutter, filter assembly, and other components of this camera; it includes a link to an article at llnl.gov describing the LSST and their work on the 1.57-meter L-1 and 1.2-meter L-2 lenses.

        To clarify: When it is complete the camera will have the largest optical lens ever constructed, which will be small compared to the mirror system (8.4 meters) of the telescope of which the camera is a part.

        With that out of th

  • The first images ever taken with the camera were released on Tuesday and provided record-breaking detail of the broccoli plant.

    Was that, uh.... a hotly contested record?

  • So many years, engineering and dollars in the making, and when they will finally deploy it, starlink satellites will photobomb into each and every picture, making it useless . So sad!
  • In two years, the stars most people will be watching with this supercamera will be porn stars...

  • Unit (Score:2)

    by robi5 ( 1261542 )

    so, 3.2 gigapixels?

    (typing it on a 3100000khz laptop)

    • You're a nerd. This isn't the site for us, any more.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsqr ( 808554 )

      so, 3.2 gigapixels?

      (typing it on a 3100000khz laptop)

      Oh, please. What did you expect? The submitter copied the text from an article in "Interesting Engineering", written by Fabienne Lang. She's not a technical writer, and the article is not written for technically savvy people. Other articles in this edition include "A Faster-Than-Light Warp Drive-Powered Spaceship May Be Possible" and "11 Book Recommendations From Elon Musk's Reading List".

      Here's the author's bio, from the magazine:

      Fabienne is a Berlin-based lifestyle, culture and travel freelance writer fo

  • When I read that I imagined they needed such precision to make sure everything is lined up and there are no small defects in the image, but looking at the pictures there is giant blackout lines in between each cell. It doesn't look like anything more than standard electronics assembly precision would be required to achieve that.

  • use this amazing amount of mega-pixels to prove once and for all that the Earth is not flat to the non-believers.

  • Still not enough (Score:3)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Thursday September 10, 2020 @07:14AM (#60491522)

    We can still clearly see the pixels on Frank's 2000" TV.

  • Link to the photos. (Score:4, Informative)

    by mrthoughtful ( 466814 ) on Thursday September 10, 2020 @07:34AM (#60491558) Journal

    The Stanford article here https://www6.slac.stanford.edu... [stanford.edu] includes links to the actual photos.

    Here is the Romanesco Broccoli https://www.slac.stanford.edu/... [stanford.edu]

    Here are details of the artefacts that can be seen: https://www.lsst.org/content/d... [lsst.org]

    • It looks like they took the pic with a 0.032MP cam?! Or at least photo'd a photo of a photo - with polaroids?!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        From what I understand this was taken without the use of a lens. A really expensive pinhole camera.

      • I know. It's not a troll. It's a pinhole into a vacuum chamber. The quality is appalling, but it was used to get orientation etc. sorted out.
        The way it was bigged up was surprising for the actual quality that was recorded!

  • We'll see which stars have changed in brightness, and anything that has moved through the sky like asteroids and comets,

    But most of all, Starlink satellites.

  • "The plan for the VRO is to map out the sky by snapping pictures with the new digital camera every few nights for a decade."

    Wow, must be a cheap camera if they only take 1 picture every few days with it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dargaud ( 518470 )
      No, it means it'll take many pictures, but it'll repeatedly look at the same area of the sky every few nights, enabling efficient comparisons: variable stars, asteroids, transient phenomena, exoplanets passing in front of their stars...

  • Highest resolution camera ever, and they use it to take a picture of their lunch! Actually very cool pictures and great work. Can't wait to see the research images this camera will produce.

  • Back in 2000 a 4 gigapixel camera was made. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
  • ...Doesn't look like it.

    If digital camera manufacturers would advertise the bit-depth of their cameras as well, instead of just the resolution, I'd be one happy camper. Also how well it's catered towards low-light conditions. As it is now, there's people that have brand-new smartphones; but I still see the same theme from 10+ years ago: they're uploading miscoloured, grainy, blurry, compression-artifacted, barely identifiable selfies and sunsets, even if they shoot them with a "320MP" CCD...

    Everyone k

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      Everyone knows that a .WAV is 16-bit

      I used to think that. But I had to implement a WAV file reader recently (don't ask). It turns out that WAV can be 8 bit, 16 bit, 24, or 32 bit. Or have crazy encodings.

  • Pictures of our moon - see landings? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lady Galadriel ( 4942909 ) on Thursday September 10, 2020 @09:50AM (#60491850)
    So, with this new camera, can we actually get enough resolution to see the moon landing sites?

    And prove, finally, without a doubt that NASA faked the moon landings. I mean did not fake the moon landings. Oh, you know what mean. All those moon landing deniers can finally have proof, (or would that be denying that NASA faked the moon landings?), that they can hold in their hand, (after they buy a 3.2Gpixel printer).

    This will be a much better test that some broccoli picture!
    We can send nay sayers something else to deny!

  • Say 3.2 gigapixels. Like a normal person, who went to school, and didn't drop out after primary school.

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