The world’s largest digital camera is a 3200 megapixel behemoth that sits on top of a mountain observatory complex in Chile. Ironically, it was created by engineers that in the past have focused on tracking the universe’s smallest subatomic particles. The camera has one acronym (LSST) and goes by two long names — the legacy survey of space and time, or Large-Aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope.

The camera is part of a telescope at the Vera Rubin observatory, named after an American astronomer that studied dark matter. Everything is still under construction and is expected to become operational next year. When it does, it will work in very different ways than its peers. And while the Webb telescope has gotten plenty of press for flying around the sun these past couple of years — and rightly so, I don’t want to diminish its accomplishments — the  Simonyi telescope at the Rubin is an interesting science tool in its own right. And yes, that name is familiar to many of you. Charles Simonyi worked in the early years at Microsoft, and both he and Bill Gates were early donors to the project.

The Rubin project has been long in coming, just like the Webb. In fact, pieces of it were built in different factories and labs around the world. The camera came from California (the Stanford Linear Accelerator team), the mount was from Spain, and Chile put together the buildings housing everything.

First off, if you have in your mind this is a place where astronomers go to peer through the eyepiece of the telescope and stare at the night sky, put that picture aside. This is a digital camera, and it operates hands-off for the most part. Its goal is nothing short of extraordinary. Every three nights, weather permitting, it photographs the entire night sky, moving around in a pre-programmed pattern. Most telescopes of the past were firmly anchored to their mountain top aeries.

In the past, telescopes like Webb and other expensive instruments required scientists to schedule time on them to focus on particular areas of the sky, and then download what was collected. Committees would vet proposals and schedule the sessions accordingly. Having a telescope that sweeps the entire sky — and doing it in such high resolution — means that you can approach observations in a completely different way.

First off, you don’t download anything. Given the size of the datasets, that would take time, even on high speed bandwidth. All the data stays intact, and you run your queries remotely.

This is a massive amount of data — petabytes worth — and it is all uploaded to an open source repository. Anyone can access the information for their research or just for curiosity. I imagine that schools will jump on board using this archive. It might change the way we teach astronomy and it certainly will reach a wider audience.

Also, the science team behind the Rubin is developing software that mimics what the early astronomers did manually, to seek out changes in the observations. Did a planet move in front of its star? Is a black hole forming someplace? I remember as a child reading about Clyde Tombaugh and how he discovered Pluto (poor Pluto, now downgraded to a demi-planet) in 1930 by looking at photographs taken on different nights to find its movement. He used a device called a blink microscope to quickly flip back and forth between the two photographic plates. Now we have open source code to do that tedious task.

This means that discoveries will be made almost every night, because the universe is a busy place. Scientists don’t have to depend on picking the right time and piece of sky real estate to observe a supernova, but can have software seek out the possible event.

Finally, what I also liked is that the project is the first time a publicly-funded astronomy effort has been named for a woman.