UNIVERSE, SAY CHEESE!

IN A CALIFORNIA LAB, SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS ARE PUTTING THE FINISHING TOUCHES TO A COLOSSAL CAMERA THAT COULD CHANGE THE WAY WE VIEW THE COSMOS

- ROBERT BANINO

Pictures help us make sense of the world around us. From cave paintings, doodles and diagrams, to maps, sketches and photographs, as our tools for depicting the world have improved, so too has our understanding of it. And the device you see on these pages might be the most advanced picturing tool yet. It’s the focal plane of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, and is the biggest and most sophisticated piece of photography equipment on – or off – the planet. It’s being developed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California for one of the most ambitious astronomy surveys ever undertaken.

“It’s going to be a 10-year survey,” says Prof Aaron Roodman, the scientist in charge of the camera’s assembly. “We’re going to take images of every part of the southern hemisphere sky that’s visible from a mountaintop in Chile. And we’re doing that to enable a whole host of science projects.”

The LSST Camera won’t just be obtaining a handful of images, though. It’ll be taking around 1,000 every night. And the images will be big. The LSST Camera’s focal plane is 64 x 64cm, giving each image a 9.6 square degrees field of view – enough to contain 40 full moons. Each of the image sensors in the LSST Camera is 40 x 40mm and 189 of them have been tiled together to create the focal plane. To put that in perspective, a typical DSLR camera uses a single 36 x 24mm image sensor.