Flutterby™! : Sloan telescope

In light of the conversation about the new super-sensitive digital SLRs and astrophotography, CJ sent along this article on the Sloane telescope, an 8 foot mirror with a fairly wide field that's done the automated Sloan Digital Sky Survey:

The SDSS used a dedicated 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico, equipped with two powerful special-purpose instruments. The 120-megapixel camera imaged 1.5 square degrees of sky at a time, about eight times the area of the full moon. A pair of spectrographs fed by optical fibers measured spectra of (and hence distances to) more than 600 galaxies and quasars in a single observation. A custom-designed set of software pipelines kept pace with the enormous data flow from the telescope.