A four-ton digital camera landed safely in Chile last week on its way to making history by enabling the world’s largest galaxy survey, starting next year. Getting the camera there was a worldwide feat of technlogy and transportation prowess.
Doing big science, such as building the Dark Energy Camera, takes big effort and big cooperation. Building and installing one of the world’s largest digital cameras to conduct the most extensive galaxy survey to date as part of the Dark Energy Survey experiment required scientists and manufacturers from across the globe. Researchers from more than 26 institutions enlisted the help of 129 companies in the United States and about half a dozen in foreign countries to fabricate the often one-of-a-kind components for the camera.
Most components for the camera migrated to the Department of Energy’s Fermilab for testing and assembly, as seen in this timelapse video , before being shipped to the four-meter Blanco telescope in the remote Chilean mountains. The journey required help from planes, trains, trucks and boats to traverse continents and oceans, and ended with an 11-hour drive to a mountaintop.
–Tona Kunz
Tags: Cosmic Frontier, Dark Energy Camera, Dark Energy Survey, DECam, DES
Very good acomplishment, very exciting indeed, hope it achieves it’s goal.
One of my friends pointed me to this website : http://www.gigapixel.com/ which claims this is a gigapixel camera. If this is true then is the title of this post wrong? Thanks.
Tania:
Good question.
The site you reference says that it combines several images to reach the gigapixel size. The Dark Energy Camera will use 570-megapixels in one photograph. These are contained in 62 digital chips called charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, that each contains 8 million pixels, plus 12 chips of 4 million pixels each for guiding and focusing. The LSST camera will have more pixels, but it is in the R&D stage and not expected to be operational for years.
The Dark Energy Camera also tops the list in terms of weight, 4 tons; for the size of most of its components and for the area it will shoot, about one-eight of the sky. The DECam will have the largest optical survey power in the world and will carry out the largest galaxy survey.
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