A star discovered with iPhones
Kevin:
We thought it would be cool to to get a flash-mob like no one has seen before. Something unrealistically huge, freakishly massive. Something unimaginable!
Alex:
And I said, something cosmic.
Kevin:
Yes, Alex said: “Let’s make it cosmic.” And I said, “Telescope!” Let’s make a people telescope, a huge one. We’ll ask people to take a shot of the night sky and send in the photos. We can process them and then create one big photograph, possibly of very good quality. If we can get enough images we can build statistically a much higher resolution image than the original photos. So theoretically it could be a much better image than any existing telescope can produce.
Alex:
It’s so freaking cool!
Kevin:
So we asked people to send us images of the Orion — one of the most recognizable constellations. And then we started to get images.
Alex:
Tons of them!
Kevin:
We got more than 200,000 images. A vast majority of them taken with an iPhone. 200K of 5 mega-pixel images! Processing of all of them took 4 days of computer work. As the result we produced one 500 mega-pixel image which is almost twice as good than what the Hubble telescope can make!
Alex:
We sent it to NASA.
Kevin:
Yes, we sent it to NASA and after a month or so they answered back, saying that after some investigation they’ve recognized an unregistered star on it.
Alex:
It’s so freaking cool!
Kevin:
And they said we can propose a name for the star. So after very little thought we decided on the name.
Alex:
Iphonius!
