Scientists Capture World's First 3,200-Megapixel Photos (cnet.com) 37
Scientists at the Menlo Park, California-based SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken the world's first 3,200-megapixel digital photos, using an advanced imaging device that's built to explore the universe. CNET reports: "We will measure and catalog something like 20 billion galaxies." said Steven Kahn, director of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. That observatory is where the world's largest digital camera will become the centerpiece of a monumental effort to map the night sky. The camera will spend 10 years capturing the most detailed images of the universe ever taken.
The team working on the camera just completed the focal plane, which is an array of imaging sensors more than two feet wide. (The equivalent focal length on an iPhone 11 camera is 26 millimeters.) It took the team about six months to assemble the sensors, largely because the sensors can easily crack if they touch each other during the installation process. Since the camera isn't complete, scientists used a pinhole projector to test the focal plane. They snapped photos of an image of Vera C. Rubin (the late scientist the observatory is named for), the camera team, and a head of romanesco broccoli. CNET posted a video describing how scientists designed and built the focal plane.
The team working on the camera just completed the focal plane, which is an array of imaging sensors more than two feet wide. (The equivalent focal length on an iPhone 11 camera is 26 millimeters.) It took the team about six months to assemble the sensors, largely because the sensors can easily crack if they touch each other during the installation process. Since the camera isn't complete, scientists used a pinhole projector to test the focal plane. They snapped photos of an image of Vera C. Rubin (the late scientist the observatory is named for), the camera team, and a head of romanesco broccoli. CNET posted a video describing how scientists designed and built the focal plane.
y tho? (Score:4, Funny)
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I would venture a guess that broccoli's fractal nature would help them identify any array alignment issues.
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Now try uploading that broccoli picture to a Yelp review. "I'll never eat here again! And here's why.."
Re: y tho? (Score:2)
Re: y tho? (Score:2)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Apparently ~23,000 pixels/mm^2, but surely that's film-dependent.
Almost two ARGUS-IS (Score:1)
Re: Almost two ARGUS-IS (Score:1)
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But from TFA it turns out they just glued 189 individual 16 Megapixel focal plane arrays together.
Kinda lame tbh.
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Kinda lame tbh.
What is lame about it? Arrays of telescopes have been in use for a long time and have served very well. This is just an extension of that technique with its own special problems.
Specifically, the hardware and software that stitches together the images must be pretty significant. The output for each image must be around 250GB (assuming 32-bits/pixel) and 100% nominal payload of PCI-E 3.0 would take about 9 seconds to just transfer that. Of course there aren't many storage devices that could receiv
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Its a scientific camera so while the article talks about pixels,the noise, dark current and spectral response are important. It operates at cryogenic temperatures for lower noise and high dynamic range.
that doesn't make it "better" than commercial imagers, just different.
That broccoli will take a lot of Instagram filters (Score:3)
Quickly... (Score:1)
Attention Millennials (Score:5, Informative)
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I think we can safely repurpose it now. It's not like DEC is ever going to release another product.
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This logo is still property of HPE Inc., AFAIK. They should be asked first about that.
Re: Attention Millennials (Score:2)
Found the capitalist.
Re:Attention Millennials (Score:4, Funny)
We tell them every fucking time and they still never listen. Next up the Sun logo for any stories involving solar power.
Re: Attention Millennials (Score:2)
Maybe the images will be processed by Dec Alpha cluster.
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This logo salad has been ongoing on Slashdot, because the current editors do not know the history of the site ...
Read what I wrote here: Slashdot's downward slope continues: Ignorance of Icons/Logos [baheyeldin.com].
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It's both. DEC hasn't existed for a long while, and all trademarks have long expired over a decade ago.
So yes, technically it's free to use, and it's being used by many "digital" devices. I've seen it on musical instrument accessories and on many things from China.
I believe Oracle still owns the Sun trademark and logos so you can't use them yet.
Prefixes? Do you know em?? (Score:1)
Should've used 3,200,000,000,000,000,000 milli-milli-millipixels! Much bigger dumber number!
Why is this story having Digital logo? (Score:1)
Soon, almost every frame will be photobombed by St (Score:2)
This telescope has a very wide field of view - several times wider than the moon. With tens of thousands of planned Starlink satellites they will appear is almost all frames taken. There is a way to remove them, but it affects image quality.
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Putting more things in the sky means more things appear in photos of things in the sky shock.
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Focal plane size vs focal length (Score:2)
I'm not sure why they're citing the iPhone 11 focal length. They should be comparing focal plane width, or sensor size. The iPhone 11 primary sensor size is 1/2.55" = 0.39" = 1 cm = 0.033 feet. This 2 ft sensor(s) is 60x wider than the iPhone 11 sensor.
You want to know me better (Score:1)
Clousourcing image analysis? (Score:2)
An interesting point I got from the video is that the telescope data is to be made free to download. I suspect that this is one of those jobs where analysis of the data is the bottleneck. Just downloading one frame would be a big job over my broadband. Actually doing analysis over several frames would be full time CPU work. I am tempted to say that the compute complexity to detect changes over time is O(N^2) on the number of pixels per frame, but I think economies could be made in the algorithms.
Finally outstripping analog (Score:2)
Impressive. Even a large-format 8 by 10 negative only manages about 1200 million pixels. Given that their sensor array is "over two feet wide", they still do not appear to matching the pixel density of good analog film, but they're getting close.
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No Blade Runner references? (Score:1)