Scientist complete construction of largest digital camera ever made by man

A group of scientists have completed the construction of a 3.2-billion-pixel camera that can collect 15 terabytes of data, considered to be the largest digital camera ever made by man.

The LSST Camera, which took no less than nine years to construct, will be the focal point of the Vera Rubin Observatory, and is ready to start exploring the southern skies.

Every 20 seconds, the camera is expected to take a 15-second exposure of the sky using its 5.1-foot-wide optical lens. It will automatically change filters to view light in every wavelength range, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared.

Željko Ivezić, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington and director of the Rubin Observatory’s construction, said in a recent SLAC release that man is about to witness the most informative map of the sky ever assembled.

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“We will soon start producing the greatest movie of all time and the most informative map of the night sky ever assembled,” Željko stated in the release.

“I’m personally most excited to study the expansion of the universe using gravitational lenses to better understand dark energy,” said Aaron Roodman, a physicist at SLAC and lead on the camera program, in an email to Gizmodo.

“That means two things: 1) measuring the brightness in all six of our filters of literally billions of galaxies and very carefully measuring their shape, which has been subtly altered by the bending of light by matter, and 2) discovering and studying very special objects where a distant quasar is almost perfectly lined up with a more nearby galaxy.”

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