for more on this, see the New York Times article on the observatory: How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.

this is not serious enough for the mod shield, but my god stop misusing the word clickbait and stop being confidently incorrect. some of you literally just use this to mean “thing i don’t like” or even “thing that explains itself in a way that is not my fancy”–neither of which is what the word actually means.

science kind of demands rigorous definitions so i can’t pretend to know how this would be accomplished but yes, at least in spirit, a lot of these moons definitely feel like they ought to be called moonlets or a similar term

Good news today: We’ve reestablished contact with the #MarsHelicopter after instructing @NASAPersevere to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal. The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout during Flight 72. ?

removing this per this comment

Stallman is the type of guy–in any case–where i think you can remove the ideas from the person without issue (quite literally here, since part of his whole deal is copyleft). it is the case that he is extremely influential in how these ideas have been formulated and manifest,^[1] but they’re really not things that live or die by him as a person.

Japan has now joined in this effort