The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile recently released a stunning deep-space image of the cosmos apparently containing over 500,000 galaxies. Not stars, galaxies!
The mind-blowing image was shot using an LSST camera, which holds the record as the world's largest digital camera and has a resolution of 3.2 gigapixels or 3200 megapixels.
The caveat in this is that this is kind of like a stacked image. It is a deep “coaded” image which is made by aligning and combining multiple exposures that were captured between April 2025 and January of 2026; as with other types of photography, combining the exposures helps suppress the noise and also helps reveal objects that are sometimes too faint to appear clearly in a single exposure.
As you would expect, the image also contains a lot of relatively nearby stars. But the galaxies captured are obviously much farther. The image includes spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, merging galaxies, galaxy clusters, and several extremely distant red galaxies.
The LSST camera, which is a world record holder for the largest digital camera, contains 189 individual 4K by 4K scientific CCD sensors, with each CCD contributing around 16 megapixels. The individual pixels in the image are 10 microns wide. The camera itself also weighs over three tons, or about the size of a family car.
The camera records light from near-ultraviolet through to visible light and to near-infrared wavelengths as well. It uses six large filters to allow astronomers to isolate those different bands of light
The field of view is a massive 9.6 square metres, which is roughly the equivalent of 45 full moons. And the optical system itself includes an 8.4-meter primary mirror with three enormous camera lenses.
An interesting fact here is that astronomers chose a particular area in the Constellation Sextons for their project, the “Cosmic Evolution Survey,” of which this image was a part, because it is away from the crowded plane of the Milky Way. Any astrophotographers will recognize that with their own small cameras they will usually want to be shooting towards the Milky Way, but not this project.
The observatory plans to photograph the southern hemisphere repeatedly through the 10-year survey that it is undertaking, which will allow it to compare images against previous observations. This will allow them to detect movement as well as comparative brightness that appears or disappears. With any luck, they will be able to capture things such as supernovae, asteroids, comets, and even potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.
To see exactly how much this image is captured, you should head over to their website to see the full size and zoom in. It's quite an experience.
