The world's biggest camera, fitted with the world's biggest lens, is now ready to use. The culmination of a 20 year project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is destined to be used at the new Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile. When installed, it will shoot 1000 3,200 megapixel photographs every night for ten years.
The camera, which weighs three tons and is the size of a small car, has been built at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, California. The front of the lens measures over five feet (1.57m) across. The focal plane is made up of 201 individual custom-designed CCD sensors, and it is so flat that it varies by no more than a tenth the width of a human hair. The pixels themselves are 10 microns wide.
