The Vera C. Rubin Observatory houses the world's largest digital camera. Here's how it'll help astronomers explore the cosmos
Next year, the world of astronomy is set to get even bigger with the first operations of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This mammoth observatory is currently under construction at the peak of Cerro Pachón, a nearly 9,000 feet-tall mountain in Chile.
To give you a more tangible idea of what 3,200 megapixels would look like, it would take 378 4K TV screens to display one image in full size, according to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is constructing the camera. That kind of resolution would allow you to see a golf ball from 15 miles away.
Where the Rubin camera is pushing into much more rarely trodden ground is with its sensors. With such a tremendously high resolution of 3,200 megapixels, the camera’s 189 sensors need to be arranged into an array and tweaked until they reach exacting specifications. Each of these sensors has 16 channels, so that’s 3,024 channels in total.
A key way the camera on a telescope differs from a typical digital camera is in the use of filters. Instead of capturing images in color, telescope cameras actually take black-and-white images at different wavelengths. These images can then be combined in different ways to pick out different astronomical features.
It will survey the entire southern sky once per week, repeating this task over and over and collecting around 14 terabytes of data each night. By having such regularly updated images, astronomers can compare what happened in a given patch of the sky last week to what’s there this week — and that lets them catch fast-evolving events like supernovae, to see how they change over time.
With its large mirror and field of view, the Rubin Observatory will be able to identify objects that come particularly close to Earth and are called potentially hazardous objects. And because this data is frequently refreshed, it should be able to flag objects that need further study for other telescopes to observe.
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