Perhaps of passing interest to the group is the largest digital camera in the world: The Pan-STARRS http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/
This is of interest (at least to me) on a couple of levels. 1) it uses over a Gigabyte of pixels in a sensor octagonal sensor array (corners unimportant since the quality of the image circle is lacking there) They call it a 64x64 sensor array, but it is not square. http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/design-features/cameras.html 2) it has discovered a comet (way way out) that may be our next Hale-Bopp in 2013. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/110622-new-comet-found-2013-visible-space-science/ Not a lot has been written about the comet since its orbit was determined, and it will probably be fine-tuned. However the JPL Horizons prediction is that it will be brightest between March 8-12, 2013 with a magnitude near -0.5. (about the brightness of Arcturus... one of the night sky's guideposts). This will be it's one and only trip through the solar system as it rounds the sun and get's tossed out. Enter C/2011 L4 in the search box of the Small Objects Database browser http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi and then click Orbit Diagram and you can play its orbit forward and backwards (zooming in and out, as necessary). Java required to use the Small Objects Database browser. I've long wondered what would prevent camera manufacturers from using sensor arrays instead of single larger sensors. I imagine that it is possible, but would require so much more from the image processing engine (along with added complexities of bus channel management, writing to card, etc.) that it just isn't worth it on a small scale, when compared to using a single larger sensor. Darren Addy Kearney, Nebraska -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
