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Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

They won't have the data processed until later this year, there is no picture right now.

> The hard drives from the South Pole telescope can’t be flown out until the end of the winter season there at the end of October.

Yeah, it'll be a while.

Pretty wild we potentially have technology to photograph a black hole and accumulate 1024 HDDs of data pertaining to something light years away but not have the tech to transmit them electronically on our planet.

We have the tech, it's just not economically feasible to do it. They do have satellite communication access but it's lower bandwidth and only available during part of the day due to the way polar orbits work.

It says it's equal of 10,000 laptops. We probably don't have a general need for that in the South Pole, so no one paid for it to be installed.

What's 1 laptop unit? From what I can gather 7PB/10000 = 700GB, so 1 laptop is 700GB?

Ok we added "soon" to the title above, "may soon" being a nicer way of saying "don't".

What a misleading title

Kind of like how I may have a LEGO star destroyer, but I need to assemble it first. Maybe it's actually just a giant brick. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hahahaha

>Kind of like how I may have a LEGO star destroyer, but I need to assemble it first.

Or more kind of like how when I push the button on my camera, I have an exposed negative, but I need to develop it first to get a picture.

Except, the act of pushing the camera button is called "taking a picture". So maybe the title is not as misleading as we're making it out to be.

What is this negative thing you speak of? ;)

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