Today is the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. I am reminded that the first astronomical data I worked with was from the Four-Shooter camera at Palomar, which was built with "second-choice" sensors from WFPC on HST.
"Nothing is perfect, of course, and CCD's have had two inherent drawbacks in astronomy: their small field of view and the sheer volumes of data they generate.... a picture is made up of about 100,000 integers. The observer needs access to a fast data-handling system and a goodly supply of magnetic tape." http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1984IAPPP..17...33P&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&plate_select=NO&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_GIF&classic=YES Here is a picture of the magnetic tapes in my basement. I took the picture with my pocket telephone-computer, whose images are made up of about 8,000,000 integers. https://www.flickr.com/photos/coneslayer/17234620576/ -- 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.
