The world’s biggest digital camera was built at SLAC, and shipped to the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in northern Chile last year. This observatory has a goal no less ambitious than to map the entire the southern sky and all of the galaxies out to 10 billion light years from earth.
At the center of the observatory is a digital camera the size of a small car, with a 5 1/2 foot entrance lens, 3.2 Giga-pixel resolution, and high precision built into each pixel to provide quality scientific data. This camera is a unique feat of engineering, designed and assembled at SLAC over the past 10 years. The huge data set from the camera will shed new light on cosmic phenomena, from the asteroids and minor planets in our solar system to the large-scale evolution of the universe.
In this talk, I will describe the camera design and discuss some of the challenges that we met during its construction. I will conclude by showing early images of the sky that the camera and the observatory have recently made public.
