On a mountaintop in northern Chile, the world’s largest digital camera is getting ready to go live. Its mission is simple but ambitious – to photograph the entire night sky in extreme detail and reveal some of the universe’s deepest secrets.
Santiago – the camera has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels, about the same number of pixels as 300 mobile phones, and each image will cover an area of the sky as large as 40 full moons.
Every three nights, the telescope will image the entire visible sky, producing thousands of images that will allow astronomers to see everything that moves or changes in brightness, he notes Noi.md with reference to .
In this way, the telescope is expected to discover about 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies that we have never seen before.
The telescope will monitor the night sky for exactly a decade, taking 1,000 pictures every night. “In 10 years, we will be talking about new fields of science, new classes of objects, new types of discoveries that I can’t even tell you about now, because I don’t know what they are yet. And I think that’s a very interesting thing,” said astronomer Clare Higgs.
