Canon Huge (8" * 8") CMOS Sensor Installed in Telescope

[g__day (Matthew)]

A friend at Canon research sent me this today - BIG isn't it?

http://image-sensors-world.blogspot....talled-in.html

Canon announced that a large high-sensitivity CMOS sensor developed by the company last year has enabled the 60fps video recording across a wide 3.3deg x 3.3deg field of view of meteors with an equivalent apparent magnitude of 10 (The brighter the celestial body appears, the lower the value of its apparent magnitude. The darkest star visible to the naked eye has an apparent magnitude of approximately 6). The sensor's chip size measuring 202 x 205 mm is said to be the world's largest surface area for a CMOS sensor and among the largest that can be produced from 300-mm wafer. The device is approximately 40 times the size of Canon's 35mm commercial CMOS sensor and makes possible video recording in dark conditions with as little as 0.3 lux of illumination.

In January this year, the CMOS sensor was installed on the focal plane of 105 cm Schmidt telescope at the University of Tokyo's Kiso Observatory, Institute of Astronomy, School of Science (Kiso-gun, Nagano prefecture).

Comparing the 8" CMOS to a normal 35mm full frame CMOS!

[naskies (Dave)]

Wow... that's quite the sensor! According to one of the links, it has a 160 um pixel pitch and 1.6 megapixels... which would mean about 1265 or so pixels wide/high.

[g__day (Matthew)]

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/08/ca...120mp-sensors/

Traditional high-resolution has been downgraded. Canon’s developed an APS-H-size CMOS image sensor capable of recording 120MP images, which will emerge at a monstrous 13,280×9184 pixels. Canon claims this 2.4-fold increase over its previous maximum resolution comes courtesy of clever new circuit timing techniques – which allow the sensor to record up to 9.5 of these huge frames per second.