Marilyn's Photos - June 24 2025 - Pictures of the Universe

 

The world's largest digital camera - what does that mean?  "In just a few hours of test runs, the observatory recorded millions of galaxies, thousands of asteroids, and cosmic phenomena we’ve never seen before. Perched in the Chilean Andes, Rubin will scan the entire Southern sky every few nights, helping scientists unlock the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and planetary defense. It’s a breathtaking scientific leap—and the camera at its heart is a true marvel." Here's the video from SciTechDaily.  I don't have a grasp of 10 million galaxies or of the 20 billion galaxies the Rubin Observatory will capture during its 10--year survey of space and time.  And this is the picture in the article - it combines 678 images.  So you can imagine how excited astronomers are.  The NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will capture more information about our universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined.   The telescope is finding never-before-seen asteroids.  There's a demonstration in a short video of how much brighter the results are.  This is their demonstration photo below. How big is the data avalanche to come?  They will generate 20 terabytes of data per night.  The catalog database is 15 petabytes, and in 10 years, there will be around 500 petabytes.  There will be billions of objects and trillions of measurements.  Were you asking the question I was?  What is a petabyte?  It is 1,024 terabytes.   And you knew that a terabyte was 1 trillion bytes.   Given this exciting adventure, it is time we learned the "Byte Chart" Let's start at the story of storage:  "640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anyone" said Bill Gates in the mid-80s.  That was the general consensus of mathematicians.  As an information retrieval professional with library training, I thought that was a strange thing to say then.  I even thought it was dumb.  These were mathematicians and not librarians saying these things.  Maybe they never went into their libraries, storing up to hundreds of thousands of books.   So here we are now with computer technology storage units of measurement based on the byte:   Name Equal To Size (In Bytes) 1 Bit 1/8 Byte 1 Nibble 4 Bits 1/2 Byte (rare) Byte 8 Bits 1 Kilobyte 1,024 Bytes 1,024 Megabyte 1,024 Kilobytes 1,048,576 Gigabyte 1,024 Megabytes 1,073,741,824 Terabyte 1,024 Gigabytes 1,099,511,627,776 Petabyte 1,024 Terabytes 1,125,899,906,842,624 Exabyte 1,024 Petabytes 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 Zettabyte 1,024 Exabytes 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 Yottabyte 1,024 Zettabytes 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 Isn't that such a lovely chart!  And where can the pictures of the universe take us?

I go to an information watercolour class each Monday.  Yesterday were were to make a floral design.

Then I did some "splots" in pastel colours, put them through the Flaming Pear Flexifly filter to get the abstract below.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca