[Michael Piziak]

What would you guess that the 1990 Hubble Space Telescope had in megapixels?

Click here for the answer:https://www.google.com/search?q=16&client=ubuntu&hs=Gn7&channel=fs&sxsrf=ALe...WziqUGW79MlhGM

Without giving the answer away, reply to this post and tell us if you guessed too low or too high.... Also, leave any comments you wish to that don't give away the answer....

BTW, I guessed that it was way lower than this number. Also, I suppose it still has that many megapixels in it - unless of course, they did some type of space walk and upgraded it....

[MarkJerling]

Ha! I guessed slightly low.

[ismaelg]

My guess was too low.

[UncleVanya]

pluto - What is the resolution in megapixels of the Hubble Telescope? - Astronomy Stack Exchange

A more complex answer.

[Mooncatt]

My guess was too low, but...

Digging deeper, the Hubble ACS camera system is actually made of two CCD imagine sensors of equal size, and my guess matched the resolution of a single sensor.

So was I really wrong?

[Lhorn]

I guessed way too low

[Michael Piziak]

pluto - What is the resolution in megapixels of the Hubble Telescope? - Astronomy Stack Exchange

A more complex answer.

Very intriguing article in your link. My favorite part of the article is:


"Many claims about megapixels in consumer and phone cameras, while technically correct, are mostly marketing blather, because there's no attempt to compare the fields of view and thus the effective angular resolution. This is why you'll be able to take much higher resolution images with a 20-megapixel DSLR than you can take with your 41-megapixel phone camera."

Regards,

Michael

---------- Post added 07-21-21 at 10:34 PM ----------

My guess was too low, but...

Digging deeper, the Hubble ACS camera system is actually made of two CCD imagine sensors of equal size, and my guess matched the resolution of a single sensor.

So was I really wrong?

We will give you credit for being right! (Now, go try to get a woman to tell you that) - apologies to all the female Pentaxians, I was truly joking! - BIG SMILES/LOL !!!

---------- Post added 07-21-21 at 10:37 PM ----------

I guessed way too low

Seems as if nearly all of us are guessing too low!

Something came across my pee sized mind, which is the question: I wonder if the camera/sensor on the Hubble is upgradeable - ?


Wouldn't it be neat if astronauts could do a space walk out to the Hubble, and give it a modern upgrade to the camera/sensor - ?

[reynb]

My guess was way off the number!

[Michail_P]

My guess was way to high.... very interesting. Algorithms must be a big part of this one...

[UncleVanya]

They mention the lack of a color filter gives 3x the resolution of a typical camera sensor of the same megapixels.

[photoptimist]

Yes, they had such sensors a long time ago. Around 1990, when I was designing a large format, high-resolution film scanner (3200 ppi over a 10" x 20" frame), we looked at various high resolution CCDs. At the time, Kodak offered a 4k x 4k CCD sensor but the purchase terms were: "you pay us $105,000, we make the chip, but we offer no guarantees about dead pixels."

The history of the megapixel race is less about the exponential growth of pixel counts (which could be quite high even in the early days) and more about exponential decline in sensor chip costs.

[gaweidert]

The government had access to much better toys that the civilian population did at the time. Same as today.

Sadly the old girl is in pretty big trouble right now. Engineers trying to figure out how to keep her going. Everything being uploaded is being corrupted and this across multiple redundant memory banks so whatever is wrong is wrong at the core level.

[Bob 256]

Not only does the Hubble have a very capable sensor, but it's a champion at doing stitched photography. Think about it, the subject never moves (well, not quite true but only at a drugged snail's pace), all the subject matter is at the same apparent distance so no parallax issues (again, not quite true but insignificant for most cases), and the lighting doesn't change much between exposures.Many of the fantastic photos you see from Hubble are stitched from a large group of smaller shots, so in those cases, the photograph has a pixel count far greater than the native sensor itself.

gaweidert is right. One of the most potentially fatal failures to ever have occurred for the Hubble happened about a week back and engineers are trying to recover. Hubble may be in need of a spacewalk repair, but "we don't do those anymore" is the repair technician's reply (at least right now).

Postscript: Hubble is back up but running on its "backup payload computer". This was managed last Saturday after an incredulous outage. Not the end yet for the Hubble

https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/07/18/hubble-resumes-science-observations-af...h-long-outage/


Lastly, I keep getting a google search for "16" from the OP's original link - something I'm doing wrong??

[Kozlok]

I guessed correctly but then second guessed twice that number. Should have gone with my first guess.

[Michael Piziak]

The government had access to much better toys that the civilian population did at the time. Same as today.

Sadly the old girl is in pretty big trouble right now. Engineers trying to figure out how to keep her going. Everything being uploaded is being corrupted and this across multiple redundant memory banks so whatever is wrong is wrong at the core level.

Yes, the reason that I got interested in creating this post/thread, is because the ole girl was recently in the news concerning what you just posted.


But, she's back online. Furthermore, she has given us some of the most spectacular photos over the years (and now continues to). I'm simply amazed at the size of the known Universe - especially how many galaxies there are out there and how much stuff is in one galaxy...

---------- Post added 07-22-21 at 10:01 AM ----------

Not only does the Hubble have a very capable sensor, but it's a champion at doing stitched photography. Think about it, the subject never moves (well, not quite true but only at a drugged snail's pace), all the subject matter is at the same apparent distance so no parallax issues (again, not quite true but insignificant for most cases), and the lighting doesn't change much between exposures.Many of the fantastic photos you see from Hubble are stitched from a large group of smaller shots, so in those cases, the photograph has a pixel count far greater than the native sensor itself.

gaweidert is right. One of the most potentially fatal failures to ever have occurred for the Hubble happened about a week back and engineers are trying to recover. Hubble may be in need of a spacewalk repair, but "we don't do those anymore" is the repair technician's reply (at least right now).

Postscript: Hubble is back up but running on its "backup payload computer". This was managed last Saturday after an incredulous outage. Not the end yet for the Hubble

Hubble resumes science observations after month-long outage – Spaceflight Now


Lastly, I keep getting a google search for "16" from the OP's original link - something I'm doing wrong??

I enjoyed reading the article you linked us to. And the photo in the article is quite impressive...