We've been following the construction of the world's largest camera, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which is equipped with a 3.2 Gigapixel sensor, since 2022. Today, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory shared the first two images captured by the LSST after it began operating at the observatory located on the Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile.
The first image above is the Trifid and Lagoon Nebula, located several thousand light-years from Earth. This giant image was created by combining 678 images taken over 7 hours of observation.
The second image shared is the Virgo Cluster, which is believed to contain up to 2,000 galaxies. In the image shared, several spiral galaxies can be clearly seen.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will take pictures of the sky every 3 days for 10 years in the hope of finding 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion new stars that have never been seen before. It is named after the late Vera C. Rubin, an astronomer who discovered the existence of dark matter.
Each image taken by the LSST camera is 6.4 gigabytes in size, with 20 TB of data collected each night. That's the equivalent of watching Netflix continuously for three years or streaming Spotify continuously for 50 years. Over the course of its 10-year operation, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will require 60 petabytes (60,000,000 gigabytes) of data to store.