Thursday, February 23, 2012

LSST 3.2 Gigapixel Camera to Become World's Largest

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) camera is supposed to be the largest digital camera ever constructed. Its size of 1.6 meters by 3 meters is roughly equal to that of a small car and it will weigh 2800 kilograms. It is a large-aperture, wide-field optical (0.3-1 μm) imager with image surface diameter of approximately 64 cm. The detector format will be a mosaic of 189 16MP CCDs providing a total of approximately 3.2 Gpixels. Each CCD has 16 outputs and is based on 10um pixel. The frame rate is 0.5fps, giving it a speed of 1.6GP/s.


LSST compiled a comparison of large cameras today:


Unfortunately, the schedule of LSST camera is quite long, the camera is supposed to be ready in 2020. I doubt it will be the largest by that time:


Actually, the recently constructed 0.5m x 1m 1GPixel Gaia camera is even larger in area, but lower in resolution.

1 comment:

  1. I suspect there's either already bigger in operation, only pointing downwards!

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