Wfcam Powerful Infrared Astronomical Camera

[iGuest 3]

Bigger isn't always better. Some things really are better in small packages, and ego's come in at the top of my personal list. So in the interest of expanding awareness and shrinking ego's I thought I would share the latest astronomical development. Nothing puts personal significance into perspective quite as well as the enormity of the universe we inhabit.

On December 22, 2004 the Joint Astronomy Center released information regarding the completion of the single most powerful infrared astronomical camera to date. The full Wide Field View Infrared Camera (WFCAM) image area is 3600 times larger than that covered by the Hubble Space Telescope's infrared camera NICMOS. It took five years to get into operation, and can see the farthest known objects in the Universe by detecting heat radiations known as infrared light. Infrared light can reveal objects that normally remain hidden at visible light, or even tell us of an object's physical nature. The picture seen above is the constellation of Orion. Larger pictures can be found at the Joint Astronomy Centre website link at the bottom of this post.

 

The following is taken from the original press release:

At the heart of WFCAM are four "detector arrays". These are similar in concept to the CCD chips in everyday digital cameras, but use a Mercury Cadmium Telluride crystal to make them sensitive to infrared radiation rather than visible light. Whilst a typical digital camera may take snapshots containing a few million pixels, WFCAM will map the infrared sky in vast tiles that contain over 250 million pixels each. When WFCAM is scanning the sky, it produces images at a phenomenal rate. In a single night, it will generate over 200 gigabytes of data --- enough to fill over 300 CD-ROM disks

Interest in the subject matter aside, think about how long it would take you to capture that much data on your digital camera...

 

To check out the press release click here.