The world’s largest digital camera, housed at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, has captured unparalleled images of the night sky. Measuring about a small car in size, the camera features a grid of sensors sealed in a vacuum and cooled to minus 148°F, resulting in high-quality images with minimal grain or speckles.
Each sensor contains over 16 million pixels and is divided into 16 segments, which are then combined to form an image. The camera captures 3.5 degrees of the sky, exceeding most telescopes’ capabilities, and takes just two seconds to download. A recent test image captured in a single shot was described as the largest ever taken, covering nearly 400 screens if shown at full size.
The observatory’s first public images will be released on June 23. The camera is expected to last over 10 years and produce vast amounts of data every night, with facilities in California, France, and Britain processing the information. Specialized software will analyze each new image with a template from previous data, revealing changes in brightness or position in the sky.
The Rubin Observatory aims to detect up to 10 million changes per night, despite some artificial streaks caused by satellites like SpaceX’s Starlink. Over the next decade, it is expected to catalog 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars across the Southern sky, providing groundbreaking insights into the universe.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/19/science/rubin-observatory-camera.html