Gigantic resolution
The Rubin Observatory in Chile.
stronomers have published the first images from the new Rubin Observatory in Chile. They were taken by the world's largest digital camera, which has been put into service there. The camera has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels. At first glance, the images hardly seem to differ from those of other telescopes. But the photos in full resolution demonstrate the true strength of the gigantic camera.
Just one snapshot from the world's largest digital camera provides so much pixel information that no single ultra-HD television would be sufficient to show the image in full size and full resolution. If every pixel of a single image from the giant camera is to be reproduced by one pixel of the television, it would take 400 such televisions to show the image in full size. An image from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory would be about the size of a basketball court if it were filled with Ultra HD televisions.
The Rubin Observatory is also particularly fast. Both in the movement of the telescope dish and in the processing of the data. Thanks to the computing power of its computer infrastructure, the facility can process around 20 terabytes of data every night and record up to ten million changes in the sky.
Photo: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
The images of the telescope's years of construction are particularly impressive. The researchers have published these on the flickr account of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. They show how carefully and cleanly work has to be carried out here in order to obtain really good images from space in the end.
Incidentally, the new observatory is named after Vera Rubin, a US astronomer born in 1928 and a pioneer of research into dark matter. She discovered evidence for the existence of this invisible form of matter when she was studying the rotation of galaxies. Rubin realized that these anomalies must be due to a halo of dark matter and its gravitational effect.
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