Pictures help us make sense of the world around us. From cave paintings, doodles and diagrams, to maps, sketches and photographs, as our tools for depicting the world have improved, so too has our understanding of it. And the device you see on these pages might be the most advanced picturing tool yet. It’s the focal plane of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, and is the biggest and most sophisticated piece of photography equipment on – or off – the planet. It’s being developed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California for one of the most ambitious astronomy surveys ever undertaken.
“It’s going to be a 10-year survey,” says Prof Aaron Roodman, the scientist in charge of the camera’s assembly. “We’re going to take images of every part of the southern hemisphere sky that’s visible from a mountaintop in Chile. And we’re doing that to enable a whole host of science projects.”
The LSST Camera won’t just be obtaining a handful of images, though. It’ll be taking around 1,000 every night. And the images will be big. The LSST Camera’s focal plane is 64 x 64cm, giving each image a 9.6 square degrees field of view – enough to contain 40 full moons. Each of the image sensors in the LSST Camera is 40 x 40mm and 189 of them have been tiled together to create the focal plane. To put that in perspective, a typical DSLR camera uses a single 36 x 24mm image sensor.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 2020 من BBC Focus - Science & Technology.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 2020 من BBC Focus - Science & Technology.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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WHAT MAKES THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET SO GOOD FOR US?
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WHAT IS MEXICO'S BLUE HOLE?
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HOW CAN I TELL IF I'VE GOT HIGH CORTISOL LEVELS?
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THE LUNGFISH
In 1836, European scientists discovered a peculiar animal from the River Amazon that they struggled to identify. Its eel-like body was a few feet long and its air-filled lungs persuaded anatomists it must be a reptile.
ARE WE THE ONLY SPECIES TO HAVE BEEN THROUGH A STONE AGE?
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Should we scrap daylight saving time?
Most of us look forward to the extra hour we get in bed every October, but researchers argue that changing the clocks twice a year harms our health
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