The largest digital camera in the world, located atop a mountain in northern Chile, will capture incredibly detailed images of the entire night sky and explore some of the universe’s mysteries.
Situated at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the new telescope nearing completion on Cerro Pachón, a 2,682-meter-high mountain about 482 kilometers north of Chile’s capital, Santiago, features a resolution of 3,200 megapixels—equivalent to the pixel count of 300 mobile phones. Each image taken by the camera will cover a sky area equal to 40 full moons, CNN reported on October 23.
The largest digital camera in the world is located at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. (Photo: Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC)
Every three nights, the telescope will photograph the entire observable sky, generating thousands of images that allow astronomers to examine anything that moves or changes in brightness. It is expected that Vera Rubin will discover approximately 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies that have never been seen before. Clare Higgs, an expert at the observatory, stated that the telescope will survey the night sky over a decade, capturing 1,000 images each night.
Construction began in 2015, and the telescope is named after pioneering American astronomer Vera Rubin, who first confirmed the existence of dark matter—a mysterious substance that makes up most of the universe’s mass but has never been observed. The project was initiated in the early 2000s with private contributions from billionaires such as Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates. It later received additional funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.
Although the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is an American facility, it is located in the Andes mountain range in Chile alongside several other telescopes for various reasons. According to Higgs, optical telescopes require high, dark, and dry areas to avoid light pollution and humidity that can reduce the sensitivity of the equipment. Additionally, the quality of the night sky in Chile is excellent. The observatory’s location is relatively remote yet not too far to hinder data collection. Currently, the observatory is in its final construction phase and is expected to be operational by 2025. After a few months of testing, the facility will conduct its first observations at the end of 2025.
The primary mission of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Essentially, this 10-year survey will allow researchers to create a movie of the southern sky over a decade. The camera captures an image every 30 seconds, generating 20 terabytes of data every 24 hours. When complete, the survey will produce over 60 million terabytes of raw data.
However, each image takes only 60 seconds to transfer from Chile to California, where AI and algorithms will analyze the data in advance, searching for any changes or moving objects and alerting if something is detected. The data will be shared with a group of astronomers each year. Every two years, each dataset will be publicly shared to allow the global scientific community to conduct research.
The data will support four main research areas: cataloging the Solar System, including the discovery of new celestial bodies, potentially even a hidden ninth planet; mapping the entire galaxy; exploring a special type of object known as “transient” that changes position and brightness over time; and gaining a deeper understanding of the nature of dark matter.
