Let's say the average TV (monitor) is 500x500 pixels. Now, stack 4 rows of 8 TVs: that's 32 TVs which is the display size you need to display 1 entire image from 1 of our CCD chips. The Mosaic Camera on the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope has 12 chips.

For 12 chips, you need to take your set of 4x8 TVs, place 6 of these sets side by side, and place another 6 sets more on top of them. That's 384 TV monitors.

384 TVs = 1 entire exposure from our CCD camera.

In 1 night we take 42 exposures.... that's 8064 TVs worth of pixels.

We need to search 16128 TVs worth of data to find the handful of supernovae.

We get hungry doing this, and while in La Serena, Chile, we recommend getting your pizza delivered from Pizza Mania: Specialita in pasta e pizza, para servirse, llevar y domicilio.

Our favorite Chilean pizza place