Stanford is building the “world’s largest” digital camera

A team at the Stanford University are working on what they are calling the world’s largest digital camera, which was designed to be used to capture images of faint astronomical objects. The camera is being built for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which is a large aperture telescope used to photograph space atop a mountain in Chile, and to investigate several astronomical phenomena, such as dark energy, dark matter and near-Earth asteroids.

So what kind of specs are we looking at here? Well the mirror on board the LSST will be 8.4m in diameter, which is massive especially for those who are familiar with the mirrors aboard their DSLR cameras. The mirror will be able to scan large areas of the sky while generating 3D maps at 800 15s exposure per session. It will also include a 189 ultraviolet, visible, infrared light-sensitive sensor on board which is capable of producing 3.2 gigapixel sized images.

The LSST is expected to be around the size of a small car and is said to feature an estimated cost of $170 million. It looks like us regular folk who may want to peer into the sky from time to time will have to go for something a lot cheaper.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Photo-Video
Tags: digital camera, Space, stanford, telescope