#camera day

Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team recently flight-certified all 24 of the detectors the mission needs. When Roman launches in the mid-2020s, the detectors will convert starlight into electrical signals, which will then be decoded into 300-megapixel images of huge patches of the sky. These images will help astronomers explore all kinds of things, from rogue planets and black holes to dark matter and dark energy.

Eighteen of the detectors will be used in Roman’s camera, while another six will be reserved as backups. Each detector has 16 million tiny pixels, so Roman’s images will be super sharp, like Hubble’s.

The image above shows one of Roman’s detectors compared to an entire cell phone camera, which looks tiny by comparison. The best modern cell phone cameras can provide around 12-megapixel images. Since Roman will have 18 detectors that have 16 million pixels each, the mission will capture 300-megapixel panoramas of space.

The combination of such crisp resolution and Roman’s huge view has never been possible on a space-based telescope before and will make the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope a powerful tool in the future.

Learn more about the Roman Space Telescope!

2020-06-29 Story Mode

Today is Camera Day, so I decided to take some photos. I took the one above this morning at exactly 7:00 AM JST. Take a look at the very center of the image, beneath the sun. You may need to enlarge the image if you can. Do you see it? It looks like a small, white crease. It’s… the corner of the world. We’re living inside a gigantic box, and I just found the edge.

Until today, I’ve been analyzing our simulation only from a technical standpoint. I could have learned something new about our fake little world just by looking around and paying attention. The way to escape this simulation could very well be right in front of us, staring us right in the face.

Today’s mission? Take some pictures. They can be of the simulated environment, the simulated people, or anything you want. If you join the Photography Club, they can upgrade your camera so you can zoom in and out. And… feel free to take some panty shots for me. Just saying.

Say ‘cheese!’

On the Shelves in Oxford today we’re celebrating Camera Day with Flash!, a look at the history of flash photography.