This is one for the imagers with 'pixel envy', the world's largest ever camera has received approval from the US Department of Energy for the build. At 3.2 Gigapixels it will be built at DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, it will be the eye of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
Starting in 2022, LSST will take digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights from atop a mountain called Cerro Pachón in Chile. It will produce a wide, deep and fast survey of the night sky, cataloguing by far the largest number of stars and galaxies ever observed. During a 10-year time frame, LSST will detect tens of billions of objects—the first time a telescope will observe more galaxies than there are people on Earth – and will create movies of the sky with unprecedented details. Funding for the camera comes from the DOE, while financial support for the telescope and site facilities, the data management system, and the education and public outreach infrastructure of LSST comes primarily from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The telescope’s camera – the size of a small car and weighing more than three tons – will capture full-sky images at such high resolution that it would take 1,500 high-definition television screens to display just one of them. Just imagine the mount required for this baby!
The full story is located here, and there is a neat animation on this link page that shows how the filter wheel will work:
https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/...een-light.aspx