The preparation of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera, which will scan the night sky in high resolution, is nearing completion. It will be installed on a high mountain in Chile, South America.
The world’s largest digital camera is being prepared for installation at the Vera Rubin Observatory on the top of the Chilean mountain, where it will shoot half of the southern sky every three days. The images will give astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists a complete portrait of this region of the sky about once a week. It is noteworthy that the new telescope will look deep into space, and, therefore, in fact, into the past.
When a person looks into the night sky and sees the usual stars, he really looks into the past. The reason is that people actually see light sent by a very distant object many years ago. All the stars that we see from Earth are many light-years away. And the farther the star is, the longer it takes for its light to reach us.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), or Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which aims to continuously monitor the sky, has received the largest lens in history with a diameter of 157 cm. In fact, it is the largest digital camera in world 3.2-gigapixel camera (3.2 billion pixels). The photographs that LSST will take on a weekly basis will form the “Survey of the Exploration of Space and Time.” The project is designed for 10 years, according to a statement from Stanford University.
The LSST camera consists of six rotating optical filters that can be turned on and off depending on what astronomers are trying to capture and the lighting conditions. Filters provide the ability to display the sky in six different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.
LSST will explore part of the sky and track changes in it to understand the nature of distant galaxies and events in the past of the Universe. It will also monitor near-Earth asteroids to make sure they don’t collide with our planet.
