All of a sudden my camera resolution seems tiny

Roberto Saracco February 6, 2015 Blog 126 Views

I have a Nikon D600 with an amazing 24 million of pixels. And I used to be very proud of that resolution. But now I just read of the plans to equip the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LSST, due to become operational in 2022, with a digital camera with the staggering resolution of 3,200 million pixels! That surely dwarfs my camera and yours as well!
The camera will be developed at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California and will be mounted on a telescope in Chile (where there is the driest desert of the world with very clear skies all year ’round.
It will take pictures and movies of the Southern sky with a resolution never before possible, generating 30 TB of data every night, 6 million GB per year. These data will be open to researchers all over the world to study the cosmos. The hope is the collective intelligence of the world will be able to unravel the mystery of dark matter and dark energy representing 95% of the matter and energy in the universe. We think we know they really exist, according to our understanding of the gravitation and general theory of relativity they have to exist, but we haven’t been able to find them.
The sky will be covered in a period of 10 years with scientists expecting to resolve tens of billions of celestial objects.
Well I was just starting to think that may be that should be my next camera when I read the specs: it will have the size of a car and weight 3 tons. May be I’ll better stick to my Nikon for a while…

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

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