25/06/2025
A new era of astronomy begins – First images from the world’s largest digital camera 📸📡
June 23 marks the launch of the largest digital camera ever built. Weighing 2.8 tons and with a resolution of 3,200 megapixels, it captures images covering more than 40 times the area of the Moon. Thanks to its telescope mount, it can also scan the entire southern sky every three to four nights. With this megaproject, researchers hope to gain new insights into modern cosmological questions like dark energy and dark matter. “It’s very likely that Rubin will find things no one has even imagined yet,” says astronomer Adam Miller of Northwestern University in the USA. And the project’s timing couldn’t be more fitting: thousands of images each night – without artificial intelligence, it would be impossible to spot anomalies in all that data.
👉 But why the Vera C. Rubin Observatory?
Astronomy lovers will know the name: Vera C. Rubin was one of the most renowned astrophysicists in the US. Her research focused on the motion of galaxies. Among other things, she discovered the first clues to dark matter while observing the Andromeda Galaxy.
Sources:
📰 Tagesschau.de
🖼️ RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/T. Matsopoulos
