On 23 June 2025, after more than three decades of evolution, from a gleam of an idea to detailed planning, exacting execution, and the physical realization of the world’s largest astronomical camera, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in Chile unveiled to the public its first breathtaking images. Among them: razor-sharp mosaics of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae, and the sprawling Virgo Cluster, home to millions of galaxies. Captured with world-class light-collecting mirrors, these images marked the beginning of a spectacular ten-year quest to map the known universe and illuminate the 95% we still don’t understand: dark matter and dark energy. An exciting, albeit, Herculean future awaits, built on an equally stunning past where dreams and science converged into one of the most staggering feats of technological achievement in modern astronomy.

Let the future map of the universe tell its own story in due time. The path to the map deserves a chapter all its own.

In 1969 Willard Boyle and George Smith of Bell Labs invented a device capable of detecting and measuring the intensity of light which they named CCD or Charge-Coupled Device: a breakthrough that earned them the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. A CCD converts incoming photons into electrical signals, creating a voltage map of light intensity, a digital proxy for the number of photons striking its surface. Initially constructed as a semiconductor chip, it quickly evolved into a pixelated imaging sensor. These sensors quickly became the gold standard for digital consumer and scientific imaging but due to costs, consumer applications such as your phone camera switched over to CMOS sensors due to lower costs. Scientific and surveillance systems, such as the Hubble Telescope, SOAR, and SNAP, still employ CCDs because of their superior image fidelity.

In the late 1980s J. Anthony ‘Tony’ Tyson, an experimental physicist at Bell Labs, focused on developing instrumentation to detect faint optical signals using CCDs. His inspiring contribution to the CCD was to recognize their potential in imaging the heavens and laying the groundwork for digital deep sky surveys. He quickly discovered faint blue galaxies and gravitational lensing using modified CCDs that he helped developed. Additionally, he helped build the Big Throughput Camera that was instrumental in the 1998 discovery of dark energy.

Tyson never thought small. His CCDs were instruments of the infinitesimal, but his dreams were as gargantuan as the universe itself. In fact, his dream was the universe. In 1994 he proposed his “Deep Wide Fast” telescope, a scaleup of his Big Throughput Camera and the forerunner of the LSST. The Deep Wide Fast was a concept that would combine a deep imaging device with rapid cadence, and broad coverage simultaneously. In other words, synoptic realization of the universe in near real time.

Throughout the 1990s, Tyson rallied minds and resources to shape his cosmic vision. John Schaefer of the Research Corporation helped secure early funding. Roger Angel proposed the use of the innovative Paul Baker three-mirror telescope design. Institutions like the Universities of Arizona and Washington, along with the Optical Astronomy Observatory, all hitched their wagons to Tyson’s star-filled dream of mapping the universe.

In 1998 Tyson presented designs for a Dark Matter Telescope and in 1999 the science case was submitted to the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey. In 2003 the first formal proposal was sent to the Experimental Program Advisory Committee at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). It consisted of an 8.4-meter mirror with a 2.3-billion-pixel camera capable of surveying the entire visible sky every few nights. The proposal also laid out the NSF–DOE partnership, with SLAC leading the camera development and other institutions handling optics, data systems, and site operations.

In 2004 Tyson left Bell Labs and joined the University of California at Davis as a cosmologist and continued to shepherd the LSST project from there.

In 2007 the project received $30 million in private funding from Charles Simonyi, Bill Gates, and others. The telescope is named the Simonyi Survey Telescope. In 2010 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy (DOE) joined in the quest to view the universe through the sharp eyes of the LSST.

The telescope’s primary 8.4-meter and the 5.0-meter tertiary mirrors were built at the University of Arizona, beginning in 2008, completed in 2015, and stored on-site in Chile since 2019. Fabricated in the U.S., the 3.4-meter secondary was later coated in Germany with nickel-chromium, silver, and silicon nitride, materials chosen to enhance reflectivity, durability, and long-term performance.

In 2015 SLAC, which oversaw the design, fabrication, and integration of the camera, began building the components with assistance from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and IN2P3/CNRS in France. By 2024 the camera was finished and shipped to Chile. In 2025 the camera was installed and integrated with the telescope. In June of 2025 the first light images were released to the public.

The camera measures roughly 3 meters in length, 1.65 meters in diameter, and weighs 3 metric tons, an imposing instrument, rivaling the bulk of a small car. Its imaging surface, a 64-centimeter focal plane, contains 3.2 billion pixels, each a 10-micron square, roughly one-tenth the width of a human hair. These pixels, etched across 189 custom CCD sensors arranged into 21 modular “rafts,” are laid flat to within 10 microns, ensuring near-perfect focus. The entire array is chilled to –100°C to suppress electronic and thermal noise, enhancing signal fidelity.

Before photons reach the sensor, they pass through three precision-crafted corrective lenses, including the largest ever installed in an astronomical camera, and up to six interchangeable filters spanning ultraviolet to near-infrared. The filter exchange system enables the observatory to target specific wavelength bands, tailored to sky conditions and science goals.

The integrated LSST system is engineered to capture a 15-second exposure every 20 seconds, producing thousands of images per night, tallying approximately 15 terabytes of new data. Each image covers 9.6 square degrees of sky, roughly equivalent to the diameter of 45 full moons, allowing the system to survey the entire visible southern sky every 3–4 nights. Imaging a single field across all six filters can take up to 5–6 minutes, though filters are selected dynamically based on science goals and atmospheric conditions.

The system’s angular resolution is sharp enough to resolve a golf ball from 15 miles away and at the edge of the observable universe, this scales to structures no smaller than a large galaxy; certainly not stars, not planets, nor restaurants. Over its decade-long campaign, LSST is projected to catalogue more than 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies, a composite digital universe stitched together from individual photons captured from 3 million images, each snapped every few seconds over the clear night sky of Chile. The LSST will not simply map what’s visible but illuminate the unknown. Beneath the sophisticated hardware and software lies a deeper purpose: to shine the light of curiosity on the 95% of the universe that remains in the shadows of time and space: dark matter and dark energy, the known unknown dynamic force behind galactic formation and cosmic expansion. The LSST is more than a camera. It is a reckoning with the vast unknown, a testament to humanity’s refusal to let mystery remain unexplored and uncharted: to find God.

In 2013 Tyson was named chief scientist of the LSST and is still actively contributing to the intellectual vision of the project and mentoring the next gen of cosmologists and engineers.

Graphic: LSST Camera Schematic and Trifid Nebula by SLAC-DOE-NSF.