How Fast Can We Take a Picture of the Entire Sky?

A new robotic camera is set to change what we know about outer space by capturing huge images of the night sky. Learn more on BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren vogelbam here. Our humble vantage point on Earth makes
the night sky seem like a somewhat static scene, but
in reality, the space around us is ablaze with spectacular
phenomena that fairly swarmed the heavens, such as supernova a
k a. Exploding stars and comments. Tracking these events is

(00:24):
now a little bit easier thanks to the Zwicky Transient
Facility a k a. The z t F at the
Palomar Observatory in San Diego. Scientists from the California Institute
of Technology and the University of Washington and eight other
institutions announced the camera's launching in mid November. And if
you're wondering where the snazzy name comes from, the project
gets its name from Fritz Zwicky, the first astroiod physicist

(00:47):
to conduct research at cal Tech. During his decades long career,
Zwicky spotted about a hundred and twenty supernova in stark contrast,
the instrument that bears his name should capture a fresh
supernova less than twenty four hours old every single night.
ZTF is a robotic camera that's attached to the Samuel
Oskin telescope, which measures forty eight inches or one point
two meters and has been scanning the sky since the

(01:09):
World War two ERAZTF will operate from early to the
end of likely witnessing tens of thousands of transient events
like the blooming of distant supernova asteroids and even planets
caught in the inexorable pull of giant black holes. The
five hundred and seventy six megapixel camera captures a full
forty seven degrees of the northern sky and just a

(01:30):
single image that's about seven times as much of the
sky's earlier cameras. For reference, the sky all around Earth
is about forty thousand square degrees, and the ZTF captures
three thousand, seven hundred and fifty square degrees of the
heavens every hour. That means that after three nights of work,
the ZTF will have accumulated images of the entire night sky.
The system processes those images two and a half times

(01:52):
faster than older cameras, meaning researchers can take more pictures,
spotting ephemeral events that slower devices would miss. But that's
only they have the hard drive space. Each image has
a resolution of about twenty four thousand square pixels. The
pictures are so big that they can't really be viewed
on a single display. One researcher estimates that you need
about seventy two average computer monitors to see one of

(02:14):
ztfs full resolution images. Ztfs primary role is to simply
capture and identify transient events in the sky. Later, other
facilities will help sort through the massive amounts of data,
which will also be openly published for the entire astronomy
community to view, and there will be even bigger telescopes
to come, like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Today's episode

(02:40):
was written by Dathan Chandler and produced by Tristan McNeil.
For more in this and lots of other spaced out topics,
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