SLAC/Rubin: World's Largest Digital Camera Snaps First Images

[bystander]

Sensors of World’s Largest Digital Camera
Snap First 3,200-Megapixel Images at SLAC
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory | Vera C. Rubin Observatory | 2020 Sep 08

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Crews at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken the first 3,200-megapixel digital photos – the largest ever taken in a single shot – with an extraordinary array of imaging sensors that will become the heart and soul of the future camera of Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

The images are so large that it would take 378 4K ultra-high-definition TV screens to display one of them in full size, and their resolution is so high that you could see a golf ball from about 15 miles away. These and other properties will soon drive unprecedented astrophysical research.

Next, the sensor array will be integrated into the world’s largest digital camera, currently under construction at SLAC. Once installed at Rubin Observatory in Chile, the camera will produce panoramic images of the complete Southern sky – one panorama every few nights for 10 years.

Its data will feed into the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) – a catalog of more galaxies than there are living people on Earth and of the motions of countless astrophysical objects. Using the LSST Camera, the observatory will create the largest astronomical movie of all time and shed light on some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. ...

[BDanielMayfield]

Let's hope that the growing swarms of low orbit communication satellite constellations won't hamper this Observatory from achieving it's ambitious objectives.

[neufer]

Portion of Plate b41215 of Halley's comet taken on April 21, 1910 from Arequipa, Peru with the 8-inch Bache Doublet, Voigtlander.

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Let's hope that the growing swarms of low orbit communication satellite constellations won't hamper this Observatory from achieving it's ambitious objectives.

We'll always have the Harvard College Observatory plates. If those communication satellite constellations leave the ground and you don't have those 500,000 glass plates digitized, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

<<Over 500,000 glass plates held by the Harvard College Observatory are to be digitized. From 1885 until 1992, the Harvard College Observatory repeatedly photographed the night sky using observatories in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Over half a million glass photographic plates are stored in the observatory archives providing a unique resource to astronomers. The Harvard collection is over three times the size of the next largest collection of astronomical photographic plates and is almost a quarter of all known photographic images of the sky on glass plates. The scope of the Harvard plate collection is unique in that it covers the entire sky for a very long period of time.>>

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[Ann]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

I didn't watch your video, so I will have a guess.

Is that the OWL Telescope, the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope?

Ann

[neufer]

I didn't watch your video, so I will have a guess.

Is that the OWL Telescope, the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope?

I, personally, love to watch, read & calculate. (Guessing comes as a last resort.)

No...they disembOWELed the OWL in favor ot the Extremely Large Telescope.

<<The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) was a conceptual design by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) organization for an extremely large telescope, which was intended to have a single aperture of 100 meters in diameter. While the original 100 m design would not exceed the angular resolving power of interferometric telescopes, it would have exceptional light-gathering and imaging capacity that would greatly increase the depth to which humanity could explore the universe. The OWL could be expected to regularly see astronomical objects with an apparent magnitude of 38, or 1,500 times fainter than the faintest object that has been detected by the Hubble Space Telescope. Experience gained in existing segmented mirrors (for example, the Keck telescope) suggests that the mirror proposed for the OWL is feasible. However, the projected cost was considered too high, so the ESO is now building the smaller European Extremely Large Telescope around 39 m in diameter.>>

The LSST [Large Simonyi/Synoptic Survey Telescope] is rather
the SCHLEP [SpectaCularly Huge/Large Etendue focal Plane]:

LSST focal plane array model, actual size.

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<<In June 2019, the renaming of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) into the Vera C. Rubin Observatory was initiated by Eddie Bernice Johnson and Jenniffer González-Colón. The renaming was enacted into law on December 20, 2019. The observatory is named after Vera C. Rubin. The telescope. itself, will be named the Simonyi Survey Telescope, to acknowledge the private donors Charles and Lisa Simonyi. The Simonyi Survey Telescope design is unique among large telescopes (8 m-class primary mirrors) in having a very wide field of view: 3.5 degrees in diameter, or 9.6 square degrees. For comparison, both the Sun and the Moon, as seen from Earth, are 0.5 degrees across, or 0.2 square degrees. Combined with its large aperture (and thus light-collecting ability), this will give it a spectacularly large etendue of 319 m²∙degree². This is more than three times the etendue of best existing telescopes, the Subaru Telescope with its Hyper Suprime Camera, and Pan-STARRS, and more than an order of magnitude better than most large telescopes.>>

One of the most common things that people ask for in APOD images is something to give scale, and there is little better for that than the Moon, which everyone is familiar with. Seeing it (rather than a little line marked "0.5°") in the first image is very useful.