Most telescopes take pictures of objects - this one takes pictures of the entire sky. And will do so in a time-lapse fashion for 10 years.
It's simultaneously more in line with a human's experience than an obscure wavelength of tiny object not visible to the naked eye - it takes a high-resolution picture that's similar to what you'd see if you look at the sky. But it's also profoundly grand beyond a human's experience because of just how much stuff is collected.
At the same time somehow every chunk is genuinely different. So much space my mind wants there to be a trick of some kind that reduces it
Poxssibly a naive questions, after surfing the image for a while I didn't find any einstein rings (or arcs) - are they just rare/wrong scale or something else?
and thank you!
The common pattern seems to be that the majority of data is locked away behind multi-year embargo periods, or never released to the public at all with no explanation why, with only the smallest little crumbs of raw data actually released to the public, and usually years out of date. Also you have to go through some kafkaesque chain of technologies/servers/bureaucracy to get access to that little bit of data.
It's a little depressing to me when the public funds these telescopes and then get snubbed when it comes to getting access to the data they produce.