World's largest digital camera can take 3,200 megapixel photo

Sensors of the world’s largest digital camera snapped first-ever 3,200-megapixel images at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, United States.

The sensor array is set to be integrated into the camera which is currently under construction at SLAC.

The images — largest ever taken in a single shot — are so large that it would take 378 4K ultra-high-definition TV screens to display one of them in full size. Reportedly, their resolution is so high that one could see a golf ball from about 15 miles away.

The camera will be installed at Rubin Observatory in Chile. Every few nights for 10 years it will capture one panoramic image of the Southern sky.

The data collected will then be fed into the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST is a catalogue of more galaxies than there are living people on Earth and of the motions of countless astrophysical objects.

"This achievement is among the most significant of the entire Rubin Observatory Project,” SLAC’s Steven Kahn, director of the observatory said.

“Using the LSST Camera, the observatory will create the largest astronomical movie of all time and shed light on some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy,” SLAC said in a press release.

The SUV-sized camera, which should be ready for final testing by June 2021, has a focal plane similar to the imaging sensor of a digital camera or a camera of a cell phone and has a total of 189 individual sensors.

“These specifications are just astounding,” said Steven Ritz, project scientist for the LSST Camera at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Over 10 years, the camera will collect images of about 20 billion galaxies.

“These data will improve our knowledge of how galaxies have evolved over time and will let us test our models of dark matter and dark energy more deeply and precisely than ever,” Ritz said.

“The observatory will be a wonderful facility for a broad range of science — from detailed studies of our solar system to studies of faraway objects toward the edge of the visible universe.”