Consumer cameras have gotten extremely impressive in recent years, however they’ve got nothing on this beast. This is the new 6,600 pound, 3.2 gigapixel digital camera being installed at an observatory in Chile.
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00:00 [Music]
00:04 Consumer cameras have gotten extremely impressive in recent years.
00:08 However, they've got nothing on this beast.
00:10 This is the new 6,600 pound, 3.2 gigapixel digital camera being installed at an observatory in Chile.
00:18 The camera was developed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, or ORA,
00:24 and it will peer into the night sky and hopefully unveil some of our universe's most notorious mysteries.
00:29 Here's the chief science officer with ORA, Stuart Corder, to explain.
00:33 The Rubin Observatory at the end will study a variety of different scientific topics.
00:38 But I mean, the main one and the reason why all of the different partners have gotten together
00:42 is to really understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter in the universe.
00:46 And overall, at the end of the day, the material that we see and know around us
00:51 only constitutes about 5% of the energy content in the universe.
00:54 He adds that the camera now holds two Guinness records for largest camera lens,
00:58 that being about 5.2 feet wide and most pixels, the aforementioned 3,200.
01:04 That converts to 20 terabytes of data collection each and every night this thing is pointed at the sky.
01:09 Dark energy and dark matter have long been a mystery to scientists,
01:13 despite making up most of the universe.
01:16 [music]