[via 8bitfuture]:

World’s largest digital camera passes first hurdle.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will capture the largest, deepest view of the night sky ever with its 3.2 billion pixel resolution. The LSST passed “Critical Decision 1”, meaning the project can continue to work towards construction which will begin in 2014. Primary work has begun on the 8.4 meter primary mirror being built on top of a mountain in Chile.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics.

Imagine how much better this will make spying on your neighbors.

(Source: news.slac.stanford.edu, via 8bitfuture)