I guess this can be described as the universe’s biggest selfie… Over 4 years the Pan-STARRS1 (The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) have been taking photos of the skies from its location on a desolated, dormant volcano in Maui, Hawaii. Those four years (and half a million exposures) of data collection resulted in a huge single image (and database) which is over two million gigabyte big. In fact the image is so big, that if printed at full res, it would be 2.4 miles wide, and show about three billion stars. How’s that for a selfie?!
STARRS1 is not the biggest telescope in the world, but it has the strongest astronomical camera. The camera built into the telescope is has 1.5 billion pixels compared to 10 million on a “typical camera”. Combine that with half a million exposures, 45 seconds each and you can start grasping the magnitude of the project. Oh, did I mention that each shot was captured 12 times, in 5 different wavelengths?
The university of Hawaii released the following information: Here is a short movie describing what it means to have a two million gigabyte database
