Holy crap, that's a big telescope

[unixronin]

The first development grant ($14.2 million) has just been awarded for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.  The LSST will have an 8.4m primary mirror and two other large mirrors, combined with corrective lenses to remove distortion, in "a novel optical design", and its camera will have a 3-gigapixel image sensor made up of 200 individual sensors seamlessly fitted together.  It will have a four-degree field of view (eight times the diameter of the full Moon), generate 20 terabytes of data per night, and image the entire sky every three nights.  The primary purpose of the instrument will be to look for gravitational lensing in order to infer how matter has clumped together over time.

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(Crossposted to snobss)