3.2 gigapixels: World's largest digital camera attached to its telescope
In the summer, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is due to start work in the summer, with the world's largest digital camera at its heart.
The camera during the complex procedure
(Image: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/B. Quint)
The world's largest and heaviest digital camera, weighing in at three tons, has been attached to the telescope, where it will soon be taking giant pictures of the southern night sky. This was announced by those responsible, who explained that the instrument, which is the size of a car, was lifted into its final position at the beginning of March. This is the last major step in the construction of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in which the digital camera will form the centerpiece of the Simonyi Survey Telescope. This is the name of the telescope itself. The installation was a complex and difficult task, which was carried out with millimeter precision. Final tests are now to be carried out before the telescope is put into operation.
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The giant digital camera is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and has a sensor array consisting of 201 individual CCD sensors, each with 16 megapixels. It is so precisely constructed that the surface is flat to within a tenth of a human hair. It would take 378 4K screens to display one of the camera images in full resolution. In its observatory, the gigantic digital camera will benefit from a mirror with a diameter of 8.4 meters and a particularly large field of view. This will allow it to repeatedly photograph the entire night sky and create the largest time-lapse of the night sky ever seen within ten years.
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The telescope will take its first astronomical images in the middle of the year. The detailed data collected on the position of a large number of objects in the night sky will help to measure so-called weak gravitational lenses. This is where galaxies minimally bend the light of objects behind them. The researchers hope that this will provide insights into the distribution of mass in the universe and how it has changed. Among other things, this should reveal how so-called dark energy drives the expansion of the cosmos. They also want to create by far the most accurate catalog of all objects in the solar system, map the Milky Way and research dark matter.
(mho)
