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Found out the first photo of a black hole used 5 petabytes of data, and my 32GB card feels like a joke
I was flipping through an old folder of my own shots from a star party out near Joshua Tree in 2019, mostly fuzzy blobs I was proud of at the time. Somewhere in there I pulled up a writeup about how the Event Horizon Telescope team stitched together that M87 image, and the number 5 petabytes stopped me cold. That is roughly 5,000 times the storage on my whole laptop, hauled in from eight radio dishes spread across the planet. Back when I started messing with a DSLR on a tripod, I thought stacking 40 shots of Orion was serious work. Now people are shipping hard drives by plane to crunch data for months just to get one blurry donut. It made my little backyard setup feel like a pinhole camera, but weirdly it also made me want to keep shooting. If the pros need half the globe and a supercomputer for one picture, maybe my 30 second exposures are doing alright. Curious what the biggest data pileup is that any of you have dealt with for a single image.
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