The Canadian Astronomy Data Centre is one of the leaders in integrating technology to make maximum use of the information coming from telescopes. The newest devices on a telescope are producing up to 30 Gigabytes of data a night, creating the massive challenge of processing it efficiently. The days are long gone when astronomers looked through telescopes to do their work. Instead, they make images using cameras.
Photos have several advantages over visual observations.
They can, for example, provide a permanent record of what the telescope sees, and time exposures can be made that reveal information that would be invisible to the eye. Ever since the first photograph was taken of a celestial object in the 1860s, astronomers have been making improvements, more and more information from imaging. Computers allowed astronomers to quantify what they were seeing in their images. A big advance came in the 1970s when astronomers began attaching electronic devices known as CCD cameras to their telescopes. One major problem with CCDs, however, was that they were relatively tiny compared to a piece of photographic film or a photographic plate.