Researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park have successfully tested its digital camera that's capable of taking gigantic 3,200-megapixel photos. The images are made possible by 189 individual sensors spread over a two-foot wide focal plane that dwarfs a standard camera's 1.4-inch-wide imaging sensor. Each of the sensors can take 16 megapixel images. The telescope-camera, once complete, is destined for the Rubin Observatory in Chile, where it will periodically take panoramic images of the complete southern sky for a decade. Its data will feed into the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) – a catalog containing more galaxies than there are living people on Earth.
The camera will be about the size of an SUV once complete, which is expected to happen by mid-2021. he research team has released images taken with the focal plane of the LSST camera, as well as a camera image browser viewer. Current images include the head of a broccoli, the Flammarion engraving, and a collage of the camera team. The images aren't as clear as those that will eventually be possible because they weretaken without a lens. Instead, the SLAC team used a 150-micron sized pinhole to project images onto the focal plane. How much will it cost to assemble this giant LSST camera? A whopping $168 million, according to the telescope's designer, the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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https://newatlas.com/photography/worlds-largest-camera-first-3200-megapixel-photo/
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