Vera C. Rubin Observatory releases first images

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), is an astronomical observatory in Chile. Its main task will be an astronomical survey of the entire sky every day, creating a kind of time-lapse movie of the universe, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.



The observatory is located on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, a 2,682-meter-high (8,799 ft) mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the existing Gemini South and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescopes. The observatory is named for Vera Rubin, an American astronomer who pioneered discoveries about galactic rotation rates.

This is the lens:


What is so special about this?

Well, it houses the largest digital camera ever made!

The Rubin Observatory houses the Simonyi Survey Telescope, a wide-field reflecting telescope with an 8.4-meter primary mirror that can photograph the entire available sky every few nights. The telescope uses a novel three-mirror design, which allows a compact telescope to deliver sharp images over a very wide 3.5-degree-diameter field of view. Images are recorded by a 3.2-gigapixel charge-coupled device imaging (CCD) camera, the largest digital camera ever constructed.



Mind boggling, eh? Well here is the ccd itself after being molded:

 

Additionally:
The Large-aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a 6.5-m-class optical telescope designed to survey the visible sky every week down to a much fainter level than that reached by existing surveys. It will catalog 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than 300 m and assess the threat they pose to life on Earth. It will find some 10,000 primitive objects in the Kuiper Belt, which contains a fossil record of the formation of the solar system. It will also contribute to the study of the structure of the universe by observing thousands of supernovae, both nearby and at large redshift, and by measuring the distribution of dark matter through gravitational lensing. All the data will be available through the National Virtual Observatory, providing access for astronomers and the public to very deep images of the changing night sky.