
Vera Rubin: Super telescope's giant camera spies broccoli - vijayr02
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54066586
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danbruc
Here is the SLAC news article [1] and the zoomable picture of the romanesco
[2]. The picture itself is quite underwhelming - certainly an artifact of how
it was created using a pinhole but your phone can capture a better picture of
a romanesco.

Besides that, where do the different kind of artifacts - interference fringes,
dark and bright vertical lines, white specks - come from? Why are the
interference fringes distributed pretty randomly? Dust on the sensor despite
everyone wearing bunny suits?

[1] [https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2020-09-08-sensors-
world...](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2020-09-08-sensors-world-
largest-digital-camera-snap-first-3200-megapixel-images-slac.aspx)

[2]
[https://www.slac.stanford.edu/~tonyj/osd/public/romanesco.ht...](https://www.slac.stanford.edu/~tonyj/osd/public/romanesco.html)

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mgibbs63
Fun fact: the guy who made [2] is also the co-author of the first web page
hosted in North America.

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copperx
That explains a lot.

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imglorp
Does anyone else feel like BBC writing has gone into the loo lately? Popular
science reporting doesn't need to sound like sixth grade book report filler.

> Who knows? It might even get us closer to understanding those cosmic head-
> scratchers "dark energy" and "dark matter" which appear to be controlling
> the evolution of so much of what we see when we look up.

Gah, really?

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mhh__
The man who wrote this has been working for the BBC in this capacity since
1994 at least

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gavin_gee
is it me, or does the photo of broccoli look decidedly unimpressive in the
article!

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ladberg
It was made just to test the camera sensor without any lenses, just a pinhole.
That means that the photo blurs relative to the size of the pinhole, which
probably wasn't that small.

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jcims
To me the issue is all of the artifacts in the sensors. Obviously most of the
time this is corrected in software but they look pretty rough.

