3.2 billion-pixel digital camera chip

[Speed]

No joke. Of course this thing is going to be used in a large (8.4 meter) telescope.

"The tertiary mirror then bounces that light, this time to a huge -- almost 2 feet square -- 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera chip in the middle of the secondary mirror."

Here's the full story:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/...=115633686&c=y

[SmartWombat]

Journalistic licence runs wild ?
The LSST website says "LSST's focal plane will be populated by 189 novel CCD imagers"
So perhaps it's not "a huge ... digital camera chip"
But instead an array of chips, making up a huge digital camera.

The problem is going to be getting the CCD imagers aligned and dealing with the gaps between imagers. There will come a point where they can't do it physically and they'll have to resort to software magic to paper over the cracks

The really smart part is getting the electronics off the top of the chip, so that you're not wasting imager space on wiring and amplifiers on the surface. Even more cleverer is getting the interconnects off the front surface, even at the edges, so that you can butt the chips together.

[SpeedingSphere]

jeez.. theyre expecting terabytes of info each night which have to be sorted.. and look who steps in to help, storage-giant google.. lol.. Thats crazy. I hope they'll stick up a full res image of one of its shots... That would be great.

[SmartWombat]

The storage requirements are amazing.
PETAbytes of data.
That's more than truckloads

[Speed]

Journalistic licence runs wild ?
The LSST website says "LSST's focal plane will be populated by 189 novel CCD imagers"
So perhaps it's not "a huge ... digital camera chip"
But instead an array of chips, making up a huge digital camera.

The problem is going to be getting the CCD imagers aligned and dealing with the gaps between imagers. There will come a point where they can't do it physically and they'll have to resort to software magic to paper over the cracks

The really smart part is getting the electronics off the top of the chip, so that you're not wasting imager space on wiring and amplifiers on the surface. Even more cleverer is getting the interconnects off the front surface, even at the edges, so that you can butt the chips together.

I suppose they meant cumulatively, it will be 2 feet square and have 3.2 billion pixels. I figure it's a given there will be advanced software involved.

Coupling digital sensors is rather like building segmented mirrors, which several of the larger telescopes have, that are kept aligned by computers to create a single, sharp image.

It is still an amazing feat of engineering, and the volumes of data this thing will produce is mind boggling! It will capture the entire night sky in three nights, then do it over again, and again, looking for changes. It's an incredible time to be an astronomer.

As far as going through the data, amateur astronomers are currrently going through data from several space missions and finding all kinds of things the professionals don't have time for. The SOHO spacecraft (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) has spotted hundreds (I think it actually is in the thousands) of small comets, that amateur astonomers have found while going through the data. They will undoubtedly be going through the data from the LSST as well.