The sky is vast. I mean vast. But one would think that with all the telescopes we have now probing through the heavens every night that almost nothing would escape our notice. Right? Wrong.

The scopes that we have now are powerful, to be sure, but are completely focused on just infinitesimal specks of sky. Even if hundreds of scopes are up at any given moment, most heavenly events go completely unnoticed.

That is why one of the latest technical innovations just hitting the airwaves holds such great promise. And it is happening on our very own Palomar Mountain in a project called the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey.

We all know of The Telescope on Palomar, the 200-inch Hale inside that monstrous white dome. But there are other scopes there, as well, contributing nightly to the advancement of astronomy.

One is the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Telescope located in a dome just a stone's throw away from the Big One.

What is special about this scope is that it has an amazingly wide field of view, covering an area of sky greater than 15 Full Moons; no speck of sky here. And it has a huge digital camera attached, 100 megapixels strong to be exact. So what? So this:

In days of old, astronomers would spend literally hours trying to expose just one tiny fleck of sky onto a photographic plate. Now, the camera mounted on the Samuel Oschin scope with that super-sized, superfast camera can take over 100 gigabytes worth of images a night. That's enough info to fill an average computer hard drive. But that's not all!

In days of old - well, even now - astronomers then have to pour over those images and look for stuff that's new or different. That consumes a lot of time.

The PTF survey is set up so that it can take all those images and send them wirelessly to computers which then sift through the images automatically to search for new objects.

If the computers find something out of the ordinary, they can alert observatories throughout the world, giving them a "heads up" that maybe something worth looking at is in a particular part of the sky. The PTF survey is putting a million eyes on the sky at once.

What can it detect for us? All kinds of supernovae, cataclysmic variable stars, possible planets around other stars, near-Earth asteroids, oh my! And it finds them fast.

"Today I found five new supernovae before breakfast," says Caltech's Robert Quimby, a postdoctoral scholar and leader of the PTF software team. "In the previous survey I worked on, I found 30 in two years."

Modern technology combined with a workhorse telescope are adding to our rapidly growing knowledge of our beautiful universe. Go team!