The Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea has a mirror over 8 meters in diameter. Last year, it began to take images with a new wide-field digital camera, Hyper Suprime-Cam. The camera produces 870 Megapixel images 1.5 degrees in diameter, making it one of the most powerful ground-based astronomical instruments. In the past week, a new project has used Hyper Suprime-Cam to find distant supernovae, using software which automatically compared images taken this July 2-3 with images of the same area of the sky taken several years ago.
These objects have yet to be confirmed as supernovae, but this early result suggests that the project may discover many very distant supernovae over the next few years. If some can be identified as one particular type of exploding star, called Type Ia Supernovae, they may be used as
standard candles
to measure the distance to high-redshift galaxies and help to pin down the expansion of the universe.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Saturday July 05 2014, @10:46PM
Well we've been cracking jokes about the forthcoming super gargantuan telescope for years. It's obviously going to have to have a delightfully impressive camera.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday July 05 2014, @11:25PM
Make up your mind...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday July 06 2014, @12:56AM
870 megapixels is quite impressive. Depressingly, people will be taking selfies at this resolution within 20 years and then filtering the heck out of the pictures to "improve" them.
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