Scientists finish work building largest camera in the world

The world's largest digital camera, fully built and ready to snap some stills of space

A world record-breaking digital camera is now ready to take some truly out-of-this-world pictures.

Scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California have completed work on the largest digital camera in the world, first revealed back in 2022, which will help researchers learn more about the universe.

But how big is it exactly?

Well, it's not something you could keep in your pocket... it's about the same size as a small car and weighs a massive 2,800kg (441 stone)!

Construction on the camera began back in 2015

The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera has been built to capture ground-breaking photos of space.

According to the Guinness World Records, it's not only the largest digital camera in the world, it has the highest resolution too.

This means that the LSST can take incredibly detailed pictures, especially when you compare it to the kind of pictures our phones can take.

Some top-of-the-range phones have cameras with a resolution of up to 50 megapixels, but the LSST has a 3,200 of them!

This will be the camera's home for the next 10 years - a new observatory in Chile

The next step in the camera's journey will see it transported to the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is on top of the Cerro Pachón mountain.

Once there, it will be installed on a powerful telescope, where it will take hundreds of these crystal clear photos every night for ten years.

According to Stanford University, who run the SLAC, these photos "will cover the entire southern sky and provide the widest, fastest and deepest views of the night sky ever observed."

Stanford are hoping that the camera will allow scientists to learn more about the mysterious dark energy and dark matter that makes up 95% of the universe, as well as alerting them to asteroids and understanding how galaxies are formed.