A New 3,200-Megapixel Camera Has Astronomers Salivating

The world's biggest digital camera is about to get attention. Astronomers have built a device that can image the distant universe with a resolution of more than 3 gigapixels. A gigapixel is the same as a thousand mpbs.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is almost done with its telescope, which has been in the works for about two decades. At the end of September, scientists and technicians working in an enormous clean room at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory finished assembling the sensitive camera's mechanical components, and they are now moving ahead to its final pre-installation tests. The combination of the camera's giant focal plane and a 25-foot mirror is unparalleled. The focal plane is in the Guinness Book of World Records because it's the largest in the world.

The camera will be put on a flight to the telescope's site in the desert mountains of northern Chile in May after being tested by engineers. Rubin's official debut, called "first light," is projected to take place in March of 2024.

For the next 10 years, the telescope will collect 20 terabytes of data a night. A map of the sky as seen from the southern hemisphere will include 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars in the Milky Way. 6 million asteroids and other objects will be photographed. It would not have been possible until recently.

It is the opposite of the approach used for the Hubble telescope, which zooms in to capture spectacular images of narrow slices of the heavens. Rubin will be scanning the entire southern sky, about 18,000 square degrees, collecting data on every viewable object and taking pictures of each area 825 times. Rubin will chart more of the universe than its predecessors, such as the Dark Energy Survey.

Thanks to the new camera, that fire hose of data will come. There are more than 200 custom-designed charge-coupled devices (CCDs), and they will take images with six filters covering the optical spectrum.

Each piece of the sky will be imaged every three days, providing snapshots that can be used together to examine faint or distant objects, such as supernova explosions and the paths of near-Earth asteroids and comets. Risa Wechsler is an astronomer with the Rubin Observatory scientific advisory committee. It is stacking the frames of the movie to get a better picture. It will give us a map of the entire universe, which shows where the dark matter is located. We will be able to see what the universe looked like billions of years ago.