Vera Rubin: First pictures taken by world's largest digital camera released
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Scientists say the images reveal breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies.One of the debut images is made up of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours.It shows the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula - both located several thousand light-years from Earth, glowing in bright pinks against orange-red backdrops.The image reveals these nebulae within our Milky Way in great detail, with previously faint or invisible features now clearly visible.Another image shows a view of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, which is about 100 billion times the size of the Milky Way.It shows lots of bright stars in the foreground, as well as many galaxies in the distance.Scientists aim to photograph the night sky every three days for ten years to show how stars and galaxies move and change over time.
What is the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera?
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the LSST is not only the largest digital camera but also the one with the highest resolution, which means it can take really detailed photos.Some top-of-the-range phones have cameras with a resolution of up to 50 megapixels, whereas the LSST has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels.But you definitely can't carry this camera around with you. It's about the same size as a small car and weighs a massive 2,800kg.Instead, it is kept at the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, attached to a powerful telescope.The mountaintop location provides dark skies and dry air, which are ideal conditions for observing the cosmos.The images it will capture are so large that it would take 400 ultra-high-definition televisions to display one of them at full size.The camera aims to take 1,000 images a night over the next 10 years and the project's mission is to catalogue 20 billion galaxies.The goal is to capture an ultra-wide and ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our universe.Experts say the observatory will transform our understanding of the universe.Images captured will help scientists answer questions about dark matter, the structure of the Milky Way and the formation of our Solar System.They also think that if a ninth planet exists in our solar system, the telescope would find it in its first year.
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