How big a camera? How about 3.2 Gigapixels. What does that look like in practice? This…

And I thought the telephoto lenses of sports photographers were impressive.

The camera is part of a huge, new telescope, the Vera C Rubin observatory, built in the high deserts of Chile where the air is thin, clear and dry, and it’s dark; perfect for astronomy. The Southern Hemisphere is also a lot more interesting for star gazers than the North.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Rubin Auxiliary Telescope in Cerro Pachón in Chile

Construction started a decade ago but work on this has been going on since the mid-1990’s. That’s hardly surprising when you consider what it’s trying to achieve:

The plan is for Rubin to capture such massive, high-resolution images of the southern sky once every three nights for at least the next 10 years. You can therefore consider it to be a super-fast, super-efficient and super-thorough cosmic imager. Indeed, those qualities are perfect for spotting some of the smallest details trailing through the space around our planet: asteroids

To do this requires the following:

  • A unique three-mirror design. Light enters the telescope from the night sky, hits the primary mirror (8.4m diameter), is reflected onto the secondary mirror (3.4m) back onto a third mirror (4.8m) before entering its camera.
  • That camera is 1.65m wide x 3m long, weighs 2,800kg and provides a wide field of view. Just one image from the LSSTCam covers an area equivalent to the size of 45 full moons in the sky.
  • All this placed on a mountain called Cerro Pachón, that rises around a 8,800 ft (2,680m) above sea level in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth outside of Antarctica.

Its first light images were released a couple of days ago and while some are the usual science-types ones showing fuzzy blobs and grainy specks there’s also pictures like these:

A huge cluster of galaxies including spiral galaxies in the vast Virgo cluster, which is about 100 billion times the size of the Milky Way.

It already seems to be doing what its supposed to:

With just a few nights of data, the Rubin Observatory team was able to identify 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system — seven of which are categorized as near-Earth objects. (No, none are expected to strike our planet. Don’t worry). For context, there are approximately a million known asteroids in our cosmic neighborhood; over the next few years, Rubin could very well hike that figure up to five million.

“This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered during the last 200 years since the discovery of the first asteroid,” Željko Ivezić, Deputy Director of Rubin’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, said during the conference. “We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years.”