Telescope In Chile Snaps Largest Single Photograph In Human History — And It’s Of Broccoli

The telescope's 3,200-megapixel camera is so powerful that it could spot a golf ball 15 miles away.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Telescope in Chile, currently under construction, will allow scientists to peer into space further than ever. Its 3,200-megapixel camera, which scientists just tested on a piece of Romanesco broccoli, is crucial to that effort - and this image is now considered the largest photograph ever taken.

According to IFL Science, the network of sensors in this telescope makes it the largest digital camera in the world. The resolution it provides is so remarkable that it could spot a single golf ball from 15 miles away.

Vera Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is about the size of an SUV. Photos taken during construction at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California are considered the largest single-shot images ever taken.

These images are so huge that viewing just one in their actual size would require 378 4K Ultra High Definition TVs.

“Taking these images is a major achievement,” said scientist Aaron Roodman. "With the strict specifications, we've really pushed the boundaries of what's possible to take advantage of every square millimeter of the focal plane and maximize the science we can do with it."

The camera works like an image sensor on a smartphone: the focal plane converts the light it receives into a series of electrical signals that generate a digital photo. The LSST camera, however, has a much larger and more complex imaging core than anything commercially available.

The handy focal plane here is over two feet wide and has 189 individual sensors, also known as charge coupled devices (CCDs). These are housed in 21 separate "rafts", which are two feet high, weigh about 20 pounds each, and each cost up to $ 3 million.

“The entire camera is about 13 feet from the front lens to the back where we have all of our support gear, then five feet in diameter - so massive,” Roodman said.

Inside this 13-foot monster are camera lenses, filters, cables, nearly 200 CCDs, and refrigeration equipment. The latter is essential for cooling detectors to a negative temperature of 150 degrees Fahrenheit. When fully assembled, the camera will be focused on the stars. However, Roodman said he wanted to test the camera beforehand by projecting an image onto the detectors before the lenses were installed.

“So I invented a little thing that I call a pinhole projector,” he says. “Basically a metal box with a little pinhole at the top and lights inside the box. A bit the opposite of a pinhole camera.

Roodman's ingenious gadget essentially made it possible to project an image of whatever was inside that box onto the camera's detectors. There is a fascinating reason why Roodman decided that this item would be broccoli.

From seashells to snowflakes, the self-repeating structures known as fractal patterns are ubiquitous in nature. Dividing these structures into parts creates smaller but almost identical versions of the whole. And so the detailed surface of the broccoli is a perfect test for the capabilities of the sensor.

According to NPR, experts actually tried a variety of subjects first before opting for broccoli. Roodman even used a photo of eponymous astronomer Vera Rubin to test the telescope's new camera as a first step.

“Mostly for fun,” he added. “It has an interesting fractal structure, and we thought it would look cool, which I think.

The camera is named after the historical study for which the camera was first designed. The 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time project hopes to take nocturnal photographs of the southern skies to generate a panorama that includes 20 billion galaxies.

The scientists involved intelligently made sure that the new name of the telescope matched the acronym of its old title, the Large Synoptic Telescope.

"This data will improve our knowledge of how galaxies have evolved over time and allow us to test our dark matter and dark energy models more deeply and precisely than ever before," said Steven Ritz, project scientist for the LSST camera at the University of California. , Santa Cruz.

“The observatory will be a wonderful facility for a wide range of sciences - from detailed studies of our solar system to studies of distant objects towards the limits of the visible universe.

As it stands, the COVID-19 pandemic halted the completion of the camera assembly. Roodman explained that he and his colleagues plan to complete it and transport it to Chile to install it in the telescope by fall 2022.

For now, the team is more than happy to have taken the greatest photograph in history, which itself will be seen as a simple failure when the LSST camera can finally photograph the cosmos in the same detail.

The Vera Rubin Observatory's telescope took the largest photograph in history, experience the highest-resolution image of the sun ever taken.