All these Sky Pixels Are Yours The evolution of telescopes and CCD Arrays: The Coming Data Nightmare

Once Upon a Time: Life Was Simple One Big Telescope One Thick Mirror One Lousy Detector

Old School But No QE

Thick Mirrors Made the support structure of the telescopes very expensive Capital Cost scaled as A 3 Would be limiting factor Thermal Issues

Solution: Develop Thin Mirrors Lower Cost for Support Structures Thermal Issues are less

Next: Combine Individual Light Sources First done at the Multiple Mirror Telescope which was commissioned in 1982

Thin to Segmented Mirrors Thin Mirror Technology (including Hubble) would dominate from 1982 to about 1998 Keck 10 meter segmented mirror

What about Detectors? Photographic/Film is horrible  non linear and no QE Need a digital detector Boyle and Smith 1969 CCD  Nobel Prize

Scalability of CCD Construction

335 Million Pixels

Optical Interferometer Can it work at short wavelengths to combine the light from many mirrors?

Real Life Complications

Towards a Full Sky Assault

Europeans Do Better

2x8.4 = 11.5 meters

World’s Biggest Single Aperture

24.5 Meter Telescope Coming Giant Magellan Telescope 7 x 8.4 mirrors

But is Big Aperture = Big Science Historically not – Historically its survey instruments that advance the field. Here comes the LSST

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 …

WOW!

Relentless Image Acquisition

Lots of Hardware

Lots of Design Issues

Focal Plane Is curved