The World's Largest Camera Released First Public Images of the Sky
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is now home to the world’s largest digital camera, nearly the size of a small car. On June 23rd, the observatory released the first public images of the sky captured by this remarkable instrument.
Before installation, the camera is kept in a clean room to protect its sensitive components.
perpendicular to the lens axis and passes through the focus point. This plane measures just over two feet across.
The focal plane is composed of a grid of sensors, each sealed in a vacuum and supercooled to minus 148°F to eliminate image noise such as grain or speckles. Each sensor is about 1.6 inches wide and contains over 16 million pixels. The sensors are organized into 21 rafts, with each raft holding nine sensors, adding up to more than 144 million pixels per raft.
The corner rafts detect guide stars, a reference star used to accurately maintain the tracking by a telescope of a celestial body, and help the telescope correct for distortions and temperature changes.
Because the camera has 3.2 billion pixels, there will be defects. Each sensor is divided into 16 segments, and some isolated segments are nonfunctional. Some other segments have excessive pixel noise, a variation in signal (or pixel value) from frame to frame, resulting in a grainy or speckled appearance, some areas appearing brighter or darker than they should be, and colors may be off or scattered randomly. Additionally, a recent incident, possibly an electrical short, may have damaged one sensor.
The camera captures 3.5 degrees of the sky, significantly more than most telescopes can map. Each image takes 15 seconds to capture and two seconds to download. A test image of an archival photograph of Vera Rubin, an American astronomer for whom the observatory was renamed in 2019, was described by the National Science Foundation as “the largest image ever captured in a single shot.” If shown at full size, the image would cover nearly 400 4K TV screens.
When Times reporters visited the observatory in May 2025, the telescope was going through calibration to measure small differences in the sensitivity of the camera’s pixels. This camera is expected to last for more than 10 years.
The observatory will produce about 20 terabytes of data every night, which will be transferred and processed at facilities in California, France, and Britain. There, specialized software will compare each new image with a template assembled from previous data, and reveal changes in brightness or position in the sky.
The Rubin Observatory is expected to catalog 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars across the sky.
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