Rubin telescope to collect up to 500,000 TB of data from 3,200-megapixel camera over ten years — each image is 6.4 GB, facility has its own data center for data storage

Rubin Observatory telescope.

Sometimes it's hard to fathom the vast quantities of data that comprise our digital reality. What's just as perplexing is wrapping your head around the insane amount of data gathered by just a single observatory monitoring outer space. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is located in Chile and takes around 1,000 pictures every day of the nighttime sky.

The New York Times recently published an interview with team members from the observatory, who confirmed that each photo taken by the telescope's camera is composed of 3.2 billion pixels, each one representing one of 65,536 shades of gray. The average image contains approximately 6.4 GB of data.