Digital Home Thoughts: Fun Friday Factoid: World's Largest Digital Camera

"A large area CCD camera has been designed and constructed at Yale University and Indiana University specifically to operate at the prime focus of the Palomar Oshin Schmidt Telescope. The array consists of 112 CCD's (4 rows of 28 CCD's each) and covers the full field of view of the telescope (3.6 o x 4.6o). The CCD's are thinned, back illuminate 600 x 2400 13µ x 13µ pixel devices fabricated at the Sarnoff Laboratories. The camera is designed to operate either in the Drift Scan or a Point and Stare mode. Each of the four rows of CCD's has a color filter in front of it with different Johnson or Gunn bands. Thus in the Drift Scan mode data in four different colors can be obtained essentially simultaneously."



The Quest Large Area Camera on the Samuel Oschin telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, CA is home to the world's largest digital camera. With 112 CCDs, the QLAC takes unimaginably-large 161-megapixel images. 8O It was responsible for locating the recently-discovered minor planets Sedna and Eris (though credit for Eris' discovery was given to another team). It's interesting to note that the QLAC was retrofitted onto the SO telescope, which was originally designed to take photographs on plates of glass up to 14" a side (in 1949!). And if you thought 160 MP was a big photograph, then the 500-megapixel Dark Energy Camera currently being developed ought to blow your mind. It sure did mine. Happy Friday, folks!