150 Terabytes and Growing

The instruments astronomers use today produce data at a, well, astronomical rate. We have also realized over the past 20 years or so that the digital data can be very useful for research beyond what the original investigator intended. Thus, the growing importance of data archives. One of the largest collections of astronomical data is located in Canada at the CADC. The CADC began in 1986 as one of three archive sites for the Hubble Space Telescope. It now archives data from several ground-based telescopes as well.vWhile the CADC still archives Hubble data the largest volume of data now comes from the Megacam camera at the CFHT

Megacam is a 340 Megapixel camera and each image it produces is approximately 750 Megabytes. The Canadian and French communities are undertaking very ambitious, five year research projects with Megacam, called the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. One of the projects uses distant supernova to understand the nature of the recently discovered dark energy.