Hello DARKNESS, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again... about a 10,000-pixel alien-hunting camera Astronomers are building the world’s largest and most advanced superconducting camera – with the goal of snapping clearer shots of exoplanets for scientists hunting alien life. Thousands of exoplanets have been detected by telescopes in space. Instruments on probes look for the characteristic dip in light emitted from stars …
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Close Up" he uses a sophisticated macroscope to look up the skirt of a posing Lieutenant Gay Ellis. Supposedly it's part of a demonstration on how it's impossible to judge magnification without reference points, but even after he gets the point Straker zooms in for a second look... you're not fooling anyone, you sly dog!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Up_(UFO)
End theme would certainly count on the dramatic mysterious music front.
What would you do with your $0.00001?
That's about how much of a tax burden this represents and it's money well spent.
There are indeed many wasteful projects but the ones that waste the most are all military, academic projects like this one are just chump change.
Why is it being wasted? If there is life out there wouldn't you want to know? Can you imagine if we don't know there is life out there and all of sudden some aliens come and steal the butter out of your fridge? Would it not be better to know so you could secure your fridge from the alien butter invaders? People just don't think these things through or are unconcerned about their butter. You need to spread the word.
more like 1975 - from Wiki In 1975 Kodak engineer Steven Sasson invented the first digital still camera, which uses a Fairchild 100 x 100 pixel CCD. By 1986 Kodak had developed a sensor with 1.4 million pixels
But sometimes it isn't number of pixels that is important as their dynamic range
Seems a reasonable enough resolution for what appears to be the first DARKNESS sensor to be fitted to a telescope. Besides, its a good idea to keep the physical size down if you're going to make it very, very cold because this saves on the refrigeration bill as well as making the package easier to install in the limited space around the focus of even a big telescope.
The detector is 80x125 pixels, which, with each pixel being 150 micrometers across, makes the sensor about 18 x 12 mm - thats very comparable with the sensor in a modern bridge camera, though with a resolution that's 1200 times less. That looks bad until you realise that DARKNESS is meant to work in the 700nm - 1um wavelength band, which is about 5.6 times longer wavelength than the bridge camera's sensor has to cope with and so needs a correspondingly larger pixel - roughly 30 times larger for reasonable sensitivity. IOW this is comparing an optical sensor with over 20 years development behind it to the first DARKNESS sensor that's expected to do real work, so I reckon its actually pretty damn good.
I'm a little surprised how little progress has been made in these devices, it only has a R=10 and 10K pixels is useful but we had 8x8 arrays back in the 90s with energy resolutions of R=500 (IIRC)
There was a bit of a hope that they would make practical near IR spectrographs for 1-2.5um
I guess there are no other applications of the technology - and the cryogenics is "challenging" so not a lot of industrial RD has gone into the field. Although I can think of a few uses for large area array SQUIDS
Cheeky headline take on the Simon and Garfunkel Song "Sound of Silence" which brought up the rather "Disturbed" version in my mind!
Canon has produced BOTH a 250 megapixel AHS-H sized colour sensor (19,580 x 12,600 pixels) in 2015 and a 448 megapixel sensor in 2010 (201mm by 205mm) which was monochrome but still VERY sensitive so BIG sensors can be made!
I'd be interested to know if anyone has run any synthetics on our own solar system and what the light dips / spectra would look like from any chosen configuration or distance. If we can model what ours would look like then we could possibly make some additional inferences about distant systems.
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