World's largest 3.2 billion-pixel digital camera project passes critical milestone
The LSST camera will be the largest digital camera ever constructed. Its size of roughly five feet by 10 feet is similar to that of a small car and it will weigh over three tons. It is a large-aperture, wide-field optical imager designed to provide a 3.5° field of view with better than 0.2 arcsecond sampling. The image surface is flat with a diameter of just over two feet. The detector format will be a mosaic of 16 megapixel silicon detectors providing a total of approximately 3.2 billion pixels. Credit: Image Courtesy of the LSST Corporation.
Symmetry breaking » Blog Archive » World’s largest digital camera one step closer to reality
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| A digital rendering of the LSST instrument, with human figures for scale. (Image courtesy LSST Corporation/NOAO) |
Perched high atop Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, the Large Synoptic
Survey Telescope will take the largest, fastest, most detailed
pictures of the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky. With these images,
researchers around the world will seek to reveal the nature of dark
matter and dark energy—and to answer a host of other questions in
astronomy and physics.
To do all this, LSST needs the largest digital camera ever built: a 3.2
billion-pixel behemoth that stands 6 feet tall and weighs more than
6000 pounds. Now, this impressive instrument has taken a significant
step toward reality by receiving the Department of Energy’s “Critical
Decision 1” approval.
The New Sky | LSST
LARGE:
A large primary mirror, the world’s largest digital camera, images that cover 49 times the area of the Moon in a single exposure, the largest public data set in the world—LSST takes advantage of new technologies to provide a qualitatively new capability for astronomy.SYNOPTIC:
A color movie of the universe.A view of the whole visible southern sky and its changes over ten years.
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