The world's largest digital camera produces its first images

A 3.2 gigapixel camera, designed and built at the Stanford-run SLAC Lab, is now snapping enormous photos of the southern night sky from an 8.4-meter telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. The first images from the observatory, released to the public on June 23, were captured during 10 hours of test observations and show cosmic phenomena at unprecedented scale, spanning millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of asteroids. Later in 2025, Rubin will begin its primary mission, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, ceaselessly scanning the southern night sky for a decade to precisely capture every visible change. The result will be an ultrawide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse movie of the universe. That data will aid in the quest to understand dark energy, which is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe, and the hunt for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up around 85% of the matter in the universe. MB01RISNOZBJYEH