Ah, C'mon Man!

The photo below is the Carina Nebula (Image credit: ESO. Acknowledgement: VPHAS+ Consortium/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit). The file used for the color version of this photo was cut down from a version that was almost 1 Mb. You can easily get a version of this picture that is 3700 x 4000 pixels. But, hey, why stop there. You can get a version that is 17383 x 18656 pixels - 350 Mb if your Internet provider doesn’t shut you down for trying to download it. Ah, c’mon, Man! We aren’t even talking the full resolution yet. A new telescope, the VLT Survey Telescope is just getting started in Chile. The scope itself is 2.6 meters but the camera, called the OMEGACam has a 268 megapixel detector. When it is in full operation it will generate 30 terabytes of data per year. Oh, c’mon.