rewrite this title The world’s largest camera starts filming space! 3200 Megapixels

This thing you’re looking at, about the size of an SUV and weighing nearly 2.8 tons, is actually a camera. Not just any camera—the largest camera ever built. It contains a massive 3200-megapixel CCD sensor array.

To better understand the resolution, let’s put it this way: the human eye can’t even perceive the full detail of its images. You know how people say, “see the big picture”? Well, this is the biggest picture. Displaying a single image captured by it would require around 400 4K TVs—that’s basically an entire basketball court full of screens.

But what exactly will this camera capture? The most detailed video of the universe ever recorded.

You might wonder, doesn’t it need a telescope to capture space images? Yes, and this camera has been mounted on an 8-meter telescope at the Rubin Observatory, which has been under development for over 20 years. Now, this observatory is the largest astronomical discovery machine ever created.

And this machine made its first public release on June 23, 2025. Here’s the very first image shown to the world.

You might ask, “How is this any different from previous images?” First of all, what you’re seeing now is just 2% of the entire image taken by the world’s largest camera. In other words, the full image is 50 times larger than what’s on screen.

And that’s only a single frame. This camera will record multiple such frames throughout the night, creating a sort of timelapse movie of the night sky, with every frame at this astonishing resolution. It will scan the entire southern sky every 3–4 nights—and then do it all over again.

This is what sets it apart from previous telescopes. While traditional telescopes are like powerful binoculars focusing on a specific spot, the Rubin Observatory is more like a surveillance camera that constantly scans and records ultra-high-resolution videos of the entire sky.

Let’s take a look at the observatory itself, because it also includes some remarkable innovations.

The full name is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in northern Chile, on top of a mountain 2682 meters high. Chile hosts many telescopes due to its ideal location and clear skies, but this one stands out for three reasons.

First is the world’s largest camera, officially in the Guinness Book of Records. With 3200 megapixels, each image is made of more pixels than the human eye can perceive. One Rubin image covers a sky area equivalent to 45 full moons. If printed, it would be as large as a basketball court. To view it properly, they developed a special web-based viewer—accessible to everyone, not just scientists. I’ll show you how it works shortly.

Second is the Simonyi Survey Telescope. With an 8.4-meter mirror and a unique three-mirror design, it’s fast. We’re talking 300 tons, but it can adjust position in seconds, unlike other large telescopes that take minutes. The observatory team proudly says, “Other telescopes are like cars; ours is like a jet.”

The third piece is the data center. It records terabytes of data every night, packaging them into ~20 TB chunks. For reference, this drive here is 4 TB—and Rubin fills five of these every night. And remember, it’s sitting atop a remote mountain in Chile. All this data travels via fiber-optic cables to data centers in the US, UK, and France.

Back to the first image. What are we seeing? A universe filled with stars and galaxies. What once looked like dark empty space is now bursting with light. Almost every pixel shows some kind of celestial object.

You’re seeing spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, and galaxy clusters. The closer, bluer ones are spirals, and the farther redder ones are ellipticals. These colors aren’t random—the camera captures a broader light spectrum than we can see, and uses it to encode distance. So, we’re essentially looking at the universe in 3D.

These clusters and their distribution reveal how the universe has expanded over time, and even offer clues about dark matter and dark energy. That’s why this observatory is named after Vera C. Rubin, a scientist who studied the movement of galaxies and gave us the first solid evidence of dark matter.

Incredibly, this single image contains nearly 10 million galaxies. Not stars—galaxies. Imagine photographing 10 million people, and then realizing each one represents 100 billion people. That’s the scale we’re talking about.

Looking at this same region again, you’ll see some objects labeled—they were previously known. But most are unnamed, never before seen by humans.

Every night, Rubin will scan the sky again and again. Scientists will create a template image for each area and compare new images to detect changes using a technique called difference imaging.

“But what could change night to night?” you ask. Well, three things: brightness, movement, and pulsation.

A sudden brightness? That could be a supernova. Rapid movement? Possibly an asteroid or interstellar object. Subtle pulsation? That might be a pulsar.

And remember, this image shows just part of the southern sky. Rubin will track 40 billion celestial objects over the next 10 years, not just photographing them but video recording their behavior.

Let’s talk about asteroids. They move fast, too fast to appear in static images. But with long exposure, they leave colored trails. These colors—red, green, and blue—represent different filters used in successive shots. Custom software identifies and removes them from still images, but keeps their data. If movement is unusual, it raises an alert.

Watch this animation from 10 hours of observation. The galaxies remain still, but the asteroids flash by. Every asteroid you see here was newly discovered.

Then we see how many were discovered night after night, and finally, their positions in the Solar System. The light-blue slice shows newly found asteroids in a tiny sector of the larger population.

In just a few nights, Rubin discovered over 2,000 new asteroids. Seven of them are labeled Near-Earth Objects, but don’t worry—none pose a threat. Still, Rubin acts like an early warning system, expected to discover 5 million new asteroids in two years—five times more than all astronomers found in the last 200 years.

The camera also tracks exploding stars—supernovae—and variable stars whose brightness changes in minutes. For the first time, we’ll be able to study their behavior in real-time, like a space documentary.

Best of all? Rubin shares its data freely. Not just for scientists—for everyone. Teachers, students, enthusiasts—spread the word. I’ll leave links in the description below. Save them. Because for the next decade, we’ll be watching a kind of live stream of the universe.

Now, let me show you how. This web-based viewer works just like Google Maps, but for the universe. The view you’re seeing is 55 million light-years away, covering the Virgo Cluster. Just 14 degrees of sky, and yet it includes over 3 trillion pixels from just seven nights of Rubin observations.

You can zoom and explore each pixel. For example, this is Messier 49, an old star elliptical galaxy, its yellow color indicating age. Over here, we see younger, blue galaxies, the stellar nurseries of the cosmos.

This is Messier 61, a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way. Dr. Rubin studied galaxies like this in the 1970s and helped prove the existence of dark matter.

Some galaxies have only two arms—like NGC 4334. Others appear as discs because we’re viewing them edge-on, like NGC 4343.

Here, galaxies are merging. Look at the tidal tails and streams stretching across space. Others appear close but are actually millions of light-years apart.

The tiny red-orange dots? Those are distant galaxies, showing us the early universe. This is a time machine in action.

You can even toggle asteroid trails—normally hidden to reduce clutter. Each color marks a different exposure, and the trail’s shape reflects the asteroid’s speed and direction.

The spiky stars? They’re from our own Milky Way—so close, their brightness causes diffraction spikes in the camera.

If you find something you like, you can create a link at that exact zoom level and share it. You can discuss, compare, and keep discovering.

Zooming out reveals rough edges—those are the areas the camera hasn’t imaged yet. But every night, it adds more tiles and fills in the gaps—building the most complete map of the sky we’ve ever had.

And remember, we’ve already seen things never seen before. Our eyes and screens alone aren’t enough. That’s why this tool exists.

If this doesn’t give you goosebumps, I don’t know what will. Either you don’t know enough yet—or worse—you don’t care. But if you do, your mission—should you choose to accept it—is to spread the curiosity.

Look, there are more stars than people on Earth. So pick one. Claim it. Nobody can stop you. There’s more than enough to go around.

And once you’ve chosen your star—watch it, study it, be inspired.

This is my star.

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