What do you get for 3 billion pixels?
 

What do you get for 3 billion pixels?
"Sky Movies"
Source of article: NEW SCIENTIST SPACE

Hmm. Makes me wonder what the resolution of the Hubble Telescope is.

Mike - I think it's actually less than 1Megapixel.

HST has got various imaging devices on it, picking up different wavelengths of EM radiation, but, rather like the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, at the time everything was designed, the emphasis was on VERY high quality sensors and very impressive light-gathering capability rather than ultra-resolution. In fact res is really rather low compared to current consumer devices but you only have to se the images to know what great imaging sensors/algorithms they use.

Sensors on Mars rovers main cameras are also only I think 1megapixel, designed and built I think by Dalsa Corporation. No dead-pixels, very good dynamic range, very good in low-light, rather necesaary as Mars is a loooong way from the Sun, very little light, but not much in the way of atmosphere either.
Great shots.

Check this out: Hubble Space Telescope shot of some of the oldest Galaxies known (viewed obviously as they were hundreds of millions of years ago) :
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...point_edit.jpg
Every point of light that's not a pure POINT is basically a galaxy, a bit like own own Milky Way. Each galaxy has billions of stars. Think what you're looking at !!

and a classic HST image, really stunning shot of Eagle Nebula:
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/1.../web_print.jpg

(better res) :
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/1...s/full_jpg.jpg

Yeah I googled it and ran across something that said 800x800 pixels for resolution, but I didn't want to believe it was that low. And the way it was written wasn't that straight forward. But I guess it's probably true.

I read an article not more then two years ago that said nasa was still using power PC processors from the 1990's. They like to bet on what's proven rather then what's new. Makes sense. But I also remember hearing years ago that the Canon XL1 was approved by Nasa. I don't know what for though.

The Hubble Space Telescope has several instruments with various resolutions. In 2002 they installed the ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys) which contains among other things the Wide Field Camera with 2048×4096 CCDs. In another (maybe older?) camera they were using or are still using four 800x800 CCDs combined together to form one 1600x1600 image.

Pixels and chips in hard radiation
 

Before you think NASA is terminally conservative in what they put up, you have to realize most of our small feature size chips wouldn't last an hour under hard radiation in space. Apparently just one cosmic ray is just a buldozer of damage so special designs are needed to somehow drain off the garbage.

That is what the Telescope is for, a zoom ;).

I think they might have just stop using the RTX Forth microprocessor from the 80's (a highly efficient device). They are all radiation hardened, and the processor choices allow for chips with larger features, as just was said.