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The VLT Survey Telescope (VST), the latest addition to ESO’s Paranal Observatory, has made its first release of impressive images of the southern sky. The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-metre telescope, with the huge 268-megapixel camera OmegaCAM at its heart, which is designed to map the sky both quickly and with very fine image quality. It is a visible-light telescope that perfectly complements ESO’s VISTA infrared survey telescope. New images of the Omega Nebula and the globular cluster Omega Centauri demonstrate the VST’s power.

A New Telescope and Camera

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is the latest telescope to be added to ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It is housed in an enclosure immediately adjacent to the four VLT Unit Telescopes on the summit of Cerro Paranal under the pristine skies of one of the best observing sites on Earth. The VST is a wide-field survey telescope with a field of view twice as broad as the full Moon. It is the largest telescope in the world designed to exclusively survey the sky in visible light. Over the next few years the VST and its camera OmegaCAM will make several very detailed surveys of the southern sky. All survey data will be made public.

“I am very pleased to see the impressive first images from the VST and OmegaCAM. The unique combination of the VST and the VISTA infrared survey telescope will allow many interesting objects to be identified for more detailed follow-up observations with the powerful telescopes of the VLT,” says Tim de Zeeuw, the ESO Director General.

“The VST project has overcome many difficulties but it is now repaying, with its excellent image quality, the expectations of the astronomical community and the efforts of the many people at INAF involved in its construction. I am very pleased to see the VST in operation,” adds Tommaso Maccacaro, the President of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).

The VST programme is a joint venture between the INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy and ESO. INAF has designed and built the telescope with the collaboration of leading Italian industries and ESO is responsible for the enclosure and the civil engineering works at the site. OmegaCAM, the VST’s camera, was designed and built by a consortium including institutes in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy with major contributions from ESO. The new facility will be operated by ESO, which will also archive and distribute data from the telescope.

The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-metre aperture telescope with an active optics system to keep the mirrors perfectly positioned at all times. At its core, behind large lenses that ensure the best possible image quality, lies the 770 kg OmegaCAM camera, built around 32 CCD detectors, sealed in vacuum, that together create 268-megapixel images.

The First Images

Both the telescope and the camera have been designed to fully exploit the high quality skies at Paranal.

“The superb images now coming from VST and OmegaCAM are a tribute to the hard work of many groups around Europe over many years. We are now looking forward to a rich harvest of science and unexpected discoveries from the VST surveys,” adds Massimo Capaccioli, principal investigator of the VST project.

The first released image shows the spectacular star-forming region Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula, as it has never been seen before. This dramatic region of gas, dust and hot young stars lies in the heart of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The VST field of view is so large that the entire nebula, including its fainter outer parts, is captured — and retains its superb sharpness across the entire image.

The second released image may be the best portrait of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri ever made. This is the largest globular cluster in the sky, but the very wide field of view of VST and OmegaCAM can encompass even the faint outer regions of this spectacular object. This view, which includes about 300 000 stars, demonstrates the excellent resolution of VST.

The Surveys

The VST will make three public surveys over the next five years. The KIDS survey will image several regions of the sky away from the Milky Way. It will further the study of dark matter, dark energy and galaxy evolution, and find many new galaxy clusters and high-redshift quasars. The VST ATLAS survey will cover a larger area of sky and focus on understanding dark energy and supporting more detailed studies using the VLT and other telescopes. The third survey, VPHAS+, will image the central plane of the Milky Way to map the structure of the Galactic disc and its star formation history. VPHAS+ will yield a catalogue of around 500 million objects and will discover many new examples of unusual stars at all stages of their evolution.

The data volume produced by OmegaCAM will be large. About 30 terabytes of raw data will be produced per year and will flow back into data centres in Europe for processing. A novel and sophisticated software system has been developed at Groningen and Naples to handle the very large data flow. The end products from the processing will be huge lists of the objects found, as well as images, and these will be made available to astronomers worldwide for scientific analysis.

“The combination of large field of view, excellent image quality, and the very efficient operations scheme of the VST will produce an enormous wealth of information that will advance many fields of astrophysics,” concludes Konrad Kuijken, head of the OmegaCAM consortium.

Science astronomy, eso

An international team of astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to carefully study the star VFTS 682 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way. By analysing the star’s light, using the FLAMES instrument on the VLT, they have found that it is about 150 times the mass of the Sun. Stars like these have so far only been found in the crowded centres of star clusters, but VFTS 682 lies on its own.

“We were very surprised to find such a massive star on its own, and not in a rich star cluster,” notes Joachim Bestenlehner, the lead author of the new study and a student at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. “Its origin is mysterious.”

This star was spotted earlier in a survey of the most brilliant stars in and around the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It lies in a stellar nursery: a huge region of gas, dust and young stars that is the most active star-forming region in the Local Group of galaxies. At first glance VFTS 682 was thought to be hot, young and bright, but unremarkable. But the new study using the VLT has found that much of the star’s energy is being absorbed and scattered by dust clouds before it gets to Earth — it is actually more luminous than previously thought and among the brightest stars known.

Red and infrared light emitted by the star can get through the dust, but the shorter-wavelength blue and green light is scattered more and lost. As a result the star appears reddish, although if the view were unobstructed it would shine a brilliant blue-white.

As well as being very bright, VFTS 682 is also very hot, with a surface temperature of about 50 000 degrees Celsius. Stars with these unusual properties may end their short lives not just as a supernova, as is normal for high-mass stars, but just possibly as an even more dramatic long-duration gamma-ray burst, the brightest explosions in the Universe.

Although VFTS 682 seems to now be alone it is not very far away from the very rich star cluster RMC 136 (often called just R 136), which contains several similar “superstars” (eso1030).

“The new results show that VFTS 682 is a near identical twin of one of the brightest superstars at the heart of the R 136 star cluster,” adds Paco Najarro, another member of the team from CAB (INTA-CSIC, Spain).

Is it possible that VFTS 682 formed there and was ejected? Such “runaway stars” are known, but all are much smaller than VFTS 682 and it would be interesting to see how such a heavy star could be thrown from the cluster by gravitational interactions.

“It seems to be easier to form the biggest and brightest stars in rich star clusters,” adds Jorick Vink, another member of the team. “And although it may be possible, it is harder to understand how these brilliant beacons could form on their own. This makes VFTS 682 a really fascinating object.”

Science astronomy, eso

Yet another cool project using the Microsoft Kinect. I am not certain what you can do with it in a snow globe. Perhaps it would be good for viewing the weather around the world all at the same time.

Using a 3D HD projector, two Microsoft Kinect sensors and some additional hardware and software a project at CHI in Vancouver can present a 360 degree view of an object.

Hardware kinect, microsoft

How would you like to have an 85 inch, 8K television? Yeah, I want one too.

Hardware hdtv

MIT has come up with a new way to view 3-D images without the use of glasses. They are calling this High-Rank 3D Display. They say it is not another parallax barrier. Instead they call it Content Adaptive Parallax Barrier. What it sounds like to me is that instead of a parallax barrier that is fixed, this one can adjust based on the content being shown.

via : MIT glasses-free 3D works from many perspectives @ CNET

Hardware 3d

VR-Zone is reporting that NVIDIA will be launching a desktop version of Optimus at COMPUTEX called Synergy. NVidia developed Optimus to save battery life by automatically switching the power of the discrete GPU off when it is not needed and switching it on when needed again. In Synergy, NVidia is doing the same thing. Synergy allows you to switch between the integrated GPU on an integrated GPU, like a Sandy Bridge processor from Intel, and a discrete GPU. The idea is not to save power, instead it is to use the Sandy Bridge Quick Sync technology for performing video transcoding jobs. COMPUTEX is held in Taiwan from May 31 through June 4.

via : NVIDIA To Launch Desktop Version of Optimus/Synergy at COMPUTEX @ VR-Zone

Hardware nvidia, optimus

The video compares an Intel Core i7-2600 CPU with an AMD 3510MX. The Intel CPU is a Sandy Bridge processor and has Intel HD 3000 graphics. The AMD quad-core processor A8-3510MX has Radeon HD 6620M graphics. Of course it shows that AMD’s Llano performs better.

Hardware amd, fusion, intel, llano

Microsoft has created an app for your Phone that allows you to create a 3-D model of an object by simply walking around it and taking pictures. They walked around a car and took 40 pictures in order to create a fairly decent 3-D model of it. The technology does not work with objects in motion, instead the object needs to be static.

via : 3-D Models Created by a Cell Phone

Graphics 3d modeling

If you have the new Geforce GTX 590, then you need to be careful when overclocking the graphics card with the 267.52 drivers. Otherwise, you may burn up your card. Then again, overclocking the graphics card with 1.025 volts being sent to the core might not be that smart either. Anandtech used just 0.987 Volts on the GPU core.

IMPORTANT: The supplied Geforce Drivers 267.52 for Geforce GTX 590 will not stop the card from overheating when overclocking. Please use newer versions from the Nvidia website and stay away from 267.52. Otherwise this may happen …

Settings used during card failure:
GPU Clock @ 772 MHz
GPU VCore @ 1,025 V

via : Geforce GTX 590 burns @ SweClockers.com

Hardware nvidia

NVIDIA is releasing a the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590 at 9 am (EDT) on Thursday, March 24th. Rumor is that the GTX 590 will have 1024 cores (512 per GPU), 128 texture units (64 per GPU), 96 ROPS (48 per GPU), and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory (1.5 GB per GPU). The memory bus width is 384 bits. It has two 8 pin power connectors, each of which can deliver 150 Watts. It can also draw up to 75 Watts from the PCIe connector. Rumor is that it will draw 375 Watts, just like the Radeon HD 6990.

PCInLife has posted some pictures of the ASUS GTX 590 which provide some additional details. The ASUS GTX 590 has 3 DVI outputs and 1 Mini DisplayPort output. Ozone3D fills in some more missing details by saying that the GPU will be clocked at 613 MHz (slower than the 580′s 722 MHz), the memory will be clocked at 855 MHz (slower than the 580′s 1.004 GHz) and the shaders will be clocked at 1.225 GHz (slower than the 580′s 1.544 GHz). The memory bandwidth will be 164.2 GB/second. The Pixel fillrate is 29.4 billion pixels per second. The Texture fillrate is 39.2 billion texels per second. TechPowerUp has a picture showing that the ASUS GTX 590 is shorter than the Radeon HD 6990.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX is rumored to cost $799. Rumors on the benchmarks show that it is slower than the Radeon HD 6990. Given the clock speeds, it will be slower than two 580′s in SLI. Tomorrow we will find out for sure what the benchmarks really are.

via : ASUS GTX590 @ PCInLife
via : Ozone3D
via : TechPowerUp

Hardware geforce, gtx 590, nvidia