MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Worlds First Super Telescope.

Australia will build in the south east of the country a ‘super-telescope' called “SkyMapper” with which it hopes to provide the first digital map of the sky in the southern hemisphere, the Australian National University (UNA) has reported.

The telescope will have a mechanism developed by the Strombolo Observatory of the UNA and the company Electro Optic Systems and will be able to capture images of galaxies 13,000 millions light years away from earth. It will be five times faster than any telescope that already exists according to the UNA press release.

University scientist Brian Schmidt said that for every minute the "SkyMapper" is working, it will be able to capture a vision of the sky 25 times bigger than the size of the moon and equivalent to a depth of a million times of what the human eye can see. The telescope will be working in three years time and will have completed its map making, in six colours, by 2009.

The "SkyMapper" which will cost 7.70 million dollars will measure 1.3 metres and will be connected to a digital camera which will be able to capture the sky's image with a resolution of 320 million pixels. The information gathered will be equivalent to 75,000 gigabytes of information or roughly a hundred thousand CD's.

With the maps astrologists will be able to identify distant objects in the universe including detecting asteroids which could collide with earth. It will also be useful in discovering new planets in the solar system and identifying composition, temperature, size and location

The telescope will be placed at the observatory in Siding Spring, belonging to the UNA, in a rural area 500 kilometres north-east of Sydney, although it will be controlled by the Strombolo observatory in Canberra.

"SkyMapper" will replace its predecessor "Great Melbourne" which was destroyed during fires in Canberra, the Australian capital in January 2003.