Big Snapshots

StarDate

Astronomers are about to need a really big photo album to store their new snapshots of the universe. That’s because their newest digital camera is ready to look skyward. Each image will consist of 3.2 gigapixels – almost a hundred times the size of the highest-resolution pictures on most smartphone cameras. It’s the largest camera ever for astronomy.

The camera was built for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will use a giant telescope under construction in Chile. It will image the entire sky roughly once every two and a half nights.

Astronomers will use those observations to study dark energy and dark matter. They’ll find new asteroids and comets in the solar system – including some that might someday threaten Earth. They’ll look for stars that grow dimmer as their own planets pass in front of them. And they’ll look for exploding stars and other rapidly changing objects and events.

The new camera was built by a national laboratory in the United States. It’s as big as a small SUV and weighs about three tons. Its field of view will cover 40 times the area of the full Moon. The project will capture about 15 terabytes of data every night – the equivalent of more than a year of high-definition video or a couple of decades of music.

The project is set to begin sometime next year – compiling a huge album of pictures of the universe.

Tomorrow: the glory of the summer Milky Way.

Script by Damond Benningfield