Hell of a camera and lens combo!

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Thanks for an interesting bit of news :grinning:
I have to say I’m a bit disbelieving of the claim that it can photograph a grain of dust on the moon… how are they going to stop the atmosphere wobbling around?
I’m not an astrophotographer but I thought atmospheric refraction etc was the main issue.
Maybe they only meant that theoretically.
And anyway, what’s that got to do with the number of megapixels! If they just put just one of those 17 megapixel sensors behind that lens, it would work just as well to photograph dust. Just cropped in.
But it wouldn’t make such a good headline…
Edit; I’ve just had a look on Wikipedia Vera C. Rubin Observatory - Wikipedia
It makes a bit more sense when one knows more about what it’s designed for - and doesn’t make me feel so sarcastic. Sorry!

Well, as for that “dust spec on the moon”, it has other places been taken somewhat down in that it’s stated that “the resolution is so massive that one could see a golf ball from about 24 kilometres away”.

Also turns out that the first use of this massive sensor was to photograph a romanesco vegetable… Have never thought of that to test resolution, but the romanesco has some kind of fractal structure.

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:rofl:
Interesting though!

…one question remains, though: when will Lensfun support it?

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But also for the golf ball, it depends on the focal length of the lens more than, or at least as much as, the resolution of the sensor. I didn’t see that mentioned in either of the articles either. They only say that the front of the lens is so and so wide, which doesn’t say more than that a certain amount of light may get in at any one time. So both the dust on the moon claim and the golf ball claim seems equally meaningless to me. All I get out of it is that this is the highest resolution sensor ever. Period.

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Well, the number of pixels is not what an astronomer would call “resolution”. The technical term “resolution” specifies the smallest angular size that can be discriminated from the surroundings. This depends on (as stated above) the focal length and the pixel size, not the number of pixels.

Hermann-Josef

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It follows from the information about this project, that the purpose is not mainly to zoom in on far away details only, but to document the development of the entire sky with a camera that (in astronomy terms, that is) is more of a wide-angle camera. It’s stated on the page that I linked to, that the camera shall document the entire sky by producing panoramic images of the complete Southern sky, once every night - which of course must be composites since in one of the movies that can be found on the page it’s stated that “the camera’s field of view from earth is that of 7 moons”. (Somebody may find the exact (equivalant …) FL this corresponds to.

I’ve found no exact info on the size of the total sensor except that “the complete focal plane of the future LSST Camera is more than 2 feet wide”. (The photo wells (“pixels”) are only 10 microns wide.) The three optical glass lenses in the camera are 1,57, 1,2 and 0,72 meters wide, the first being a new world record.

So, perhaps we may regard this camera as a forerunner in a general future trend where the more extreme and costly tele lenses give way to cropping of high resolution/pixel images from more modest teles. (Although the cost aspects of sensor vs. lens in this project is not quite clear …)

Look e.g. here

It is a mosaic of 189 CCDs with 4k x 4k pixels each. The camera has 6 filters available: U, G, R, I, Z, Y.

Hermann-Josef

That is well known, but doesn’t tell us anything about the physical size.

But where you linked to it’s stated that “The image surface is flat with a diameter of approximately 25.2 in (64 cm).”

What about this?

Hermann-Josef

Well that depends on the size of the screen the image is viewed.

But I now saw that the article you linked to in your previous post also contains the information we are seeking: The camera “is designed to provide a 3.5-degree field of view”, which corresponds to a 600 mm lens on a FF sensor (or a 300 mm lens on a 4/3 sensor).

So a 600 mm lens with a sensor with a sensor of appr. 150 times more pixels than most modern mass produced cameras that we amateurs use.

Can anybody tell us what the F-number is of this enormous lens that shall peek into faint stellar objects?

Hmmm. Gratin de sensor test tonight for dinner.

No, if you print it without rescaling, the print should be actual size.

See also here for an image.

It is f/1.2. The information is all there on the web pages I linked to.

Hermann-Josef

Actually, it is possible to mimic it at home, just take your smartphone and capture a lot of pictures of a single big canvas (or any big background) and use photoshop to stitch them. This should be able to create a huge and ultimate resolution, if you have the power and time.

I recently created a 12.3 gigapixel image, but it took me 6 hours to shoot, thankfully it was a desert, with mostly constant light sources. And it took 115 gb of ram, with 23gb final storage. I had to wait for like 2 days to let it do the thing.

Woww!!

Can only wield such a lens if you are Paul Bunyan. lolololol

Wow. :slight_smile:

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