More exciting to astronomers than a flaming new comet is the Schmidt star camera. It will clearly photograph 500 times as much sky as the small area (1° in diameter) now recorded by ordinary reflector telescopes, yet it requires an exposure only one-tenth as long as the fastest astronomical lenses previously used. Equally valuable in aerial photography for its speed and wide, clear focus, the camera is being adopted by the U.S. Army.
Inventor of the camera, the late Bernhard Schmidt of Germany's Hamburg-Bergedorf Observatory first described the device in 1931, but with...
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