Digital imaging technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. You can buy a smartphone that fits in your pocket with a whopping 200MP of camera resolution, but sometimes you just have to go big. Engineers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California are putting the finishing touches on the world’s largest digital camera, which will be at the heart of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Once installed, it will photograph the skies continuously at an unprecedented resolution of 3.2 gigapixels — that’s 3,200 megapixels.
The Rubin Observatory has been under construction for about 20 years, but the work is nearly complete. At SLAC, the team has finished assembling the camera’s sensitive mechanical components, including 189 custom-designed CCD sensors. Now, they have to conduct pre-installation tests to ensure everything is in working order before the three-ton camera is airlifted to the site of the Rubin Observatory in northern Chile.
The James Webb Space Telescope is getting a lot of attention as it zooms in to look at astronomical objects with unparalleled detail. Webb operates in infrared, but this camera was designed for the visual spectrum. Since the Rubin Observatory doesn’t have to ride a rocket into space, it can be as large as necessary to observe wide swaths of the sky. It won’t be able to see the Pillars of Creation in crystal clarity, but that’s not the goal. The Rubin Observatory will use the camera’s 5.5-foot lens along with its 25-foot mirror to collect 20 terabytes of data every single night. The observatory will see 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars in the Milky Way with a viewing angle of 18,000 square degrees.
Twilight photo of Rubin Observatory taken in April 2021. Credit: Rubin Obs./NSF/AURA
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, will be able to image each part of the sky every three days. This will create a living record of the cosmos, showing how objects move and change in brightness. The result will be a 10-year full-color movie of the sky, reports Wired. It could return detailed data on galactic-scale events like supernovae, as well as local phenomena like the movements of dangerous near-Earth asteroids. Members of the astronomical community will have access to the data on a daily basis, and the team will send out alerts about objects that move or vary in brightness.
Testing should wrap up in about two months, and the camera should head down to the observatory in May 2023. Scientists hope to conduct the first imaging tests in the second half of the year. The observatory’s first official observations, known as “first light,” are currently scheduled for March 2024.
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