World's Largest Digital Camera

1. crisderaud23 June 2010, 17:22 GMT +02:00

A new telescope in Hawaii being billed as the world's largest digital camera has begun searching the sky for potentially killer asteroids that could endanger our planet Earth.

With a main mirror about 60 inches (1.8 meters) wide, the new telescope on Maui's Haleakala volcano peak is somewhat small when compared to the large 10-meter Keck telescopes atop the Hawaiian peak of Mauna Kea.

But the telescope's 1,400-megapixel camera is a digital giant, with 1.4 billion pixels spread across 40 centimeters to snap photos of the night sky automatically, night after night, to find potentially dangerous asteroids. A typical domestic digital camera may have 5 million pixels on a chip a few millimeters across, telescope officials said.

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