The Awesome Pan-STARRS project; 1,400,000.000 pixels

[mikeemmert]

The University of Hawaii is producing a four telescope array that will survey the entire sky visible from Hawaii - about 65% of it - by using four relatively small telescopes. The secret is the enormous CCD arrays.<br /><br />From the Pan-STARRS site:<br /><br />http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/home.html<br /><br />"<font color="yellow"> Pan-STARRS -- the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System -- is an innovative design for a wide-field imaging facility being developed at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. <br /><br />By using four comparatively small telescopes, each with a 3-degree diameter field of view, we will be able to develop and deploy an economical observing system that will be able to observe the entire available sky several times each month. <br /><br />The immediate goal of Pan-STARRS is to discover and characterize Earth-approaching objects, both asteroids & comets, that might pose a danger to our planet. <br /><br />The huge volume of images produced by this system will provide valuable data for many other kinds of scientific programs.<font color="white">"<br /><br />Earth defense is always an interesting subject, and Pan-STARRS main goal is to examine near-earth objects, but they are going a little farther afield than that. Anything that blinks or moves will be picked up by this telescope system. That would include distant supernovae and Cepheid variables, both valuable distance markers; eclipsing binaries and the transits of planets in front of stars, as well as microlensing; a wide variety of pulsating stars; and, (my favorite subject) Kuiper Belt objects. I tried to copy/paste from that part of the site, but it's in PDF and wouldn't do that...so here go the typos (automatically my fault):<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">Clearly the Kuiper belt has been dynamically exited since the accretion epoch. But how? Suggested agents include scattering</font></font></font>