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All these Sky Pixels Are Yours The evolution of telescopes and CCD Arrays: The Coming Data Nightmare
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Once Upon a Time: Life Was Simple One Big Telescope One Thick Mirror One Lousy Detector
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Old School But No QE
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Thick Mirrors Made the support structure of the telescopes very expensive Capital Cost scaled as A 3 Would be limiting factor Thermal Issues 1948-1982
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Solution: Develop Thin Mirrors Lower Cost for Support Structures Thermal Issues are less
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Next: Combine Individual Light Sources First done at the Multiple Mirror Telescope which was commissioned in 1982
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Thin to Segmented Mirrors Thin Mirror Technology (including Hubble) would dominate from 1982 to about 1998 Keck 10 meter segmented mirror
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What about Detectors? Photographic/Film is horrible non linear and no QE Need a digital detector Boyle and Smith 1969 CCD Nobel Prize
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Scalability of CCD Construction
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335 Million Pixels
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Optical Interferometer Can it work at short wavelengths to combine the light from many mirrors?
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Real Life Complications
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Towards a Full Sky Assault
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Europeans Do Better
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2x8.4 = 11.5 meters
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World’s Biggest Single Aperture
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24.5 Meter Telescope Coming Giant Magellan Telescope 7 x 8.4 mirrors
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But is Big Aperture = Big Science Historically not – Historically its survey instruments that advance the field. Here comes the LSST
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LSST Concept Single 8.4 M mirror 3 degree FOV (!) 80% encircled energy = 0.2” (Like HST) 10s integration equivalent to 10hr integration with 200 inch telescope. There are 40,000 square degrees in the sky So …
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WOW!
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Relentless Image Acquisition
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Lots of Hardware
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Lots of Design Issues
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Focal Plane Is curved
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