Eye of Gaia: The Billion Pixel Camera
The largest digital camera ever built for a space mission has been painstakingly mosaicked together from 106 separate electronic detectors. The resulting “billion-pixel array” will serve as the super-sensitive ‘eye’ of ESA’s Galaxy-mapping Gaia mission. While the naked human eye can see several thousand stars on a clear night, Gaia will map a billion stars within our own Milky Way Galaxy and its neighbors over the course of its five-year mission from 2013, charting their brightness and spectral characteristics along with their three-dimensional positions and motions. In order to detect distant stars up to a million times fainter than the eye can see, Gaia will carry 106 charge coupled devices (CCDs), advanced versions of chips within standard digital cameras. credit: ESA source: www.esa.int
interesting, how far we can, and how far we will
)
just wait till porn is shot on one of these
A billion pixels is 31,622×31,622 resolution. Nearly 30 times better than HD(1080). I’d say that’s pretty good.
@Byte56Games um try 30^2 times better
Thanks for pointing that out Dave. I suppose technically, we’re both wrong. Since HD is generally defined as 1920×1080 and more likely than not the resolution of this camera is actually 1,073,741,824 pixels (2^30), not 1 billion. So it’s about 517 times better than HD. Regardless, it’s very cool.