Abstract

A single photograph taken on the 48 Inch Schmidt at Palomar records 2 billion pixels of information, over 3000 times more data than is produced by a large format CCD frame. Analysis of this data requires the development of a very high speed accurate microdensitometer, adequate computing facilities to measure the properties of the images on the photograph, and software to handle the large data base which can, for instance, classify the various types of images, collate data taken on a large number of photographs of the same area of sky, extract objects of special interest from the data set.

© 1983 Optical Society of America