Featured Image Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
The first images from the world's largest digital camera have been shared and they're something to be marvelled at.
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is housed at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy fund.
Perched on a mountaintop in Chile, the dark skies and dry air create perfect conditions for peering into the night sky.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the LSST is not only the largest digital camera but also has the highest resolution.
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For some context, top-tier smartphones boast cameras with up to 50 megapixels, while this beast delivers a staggering 3,200 megapixels.
The images are so detailed and massive that it would take 400 ultra-high-definition televisions to display one of them at full size.
That said, you won't be carrying this camera in your pocket as it's roughly the size of a car and weighs around 2,800 kilograms.
Released on Monday (24 June), the LSST's debut shots display some spectacular space scenery, including colourful nebulas, stars and galaxies.
The first batch includes vibrant images of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, which are located thousands of light-years from Earth, as reported by the BBC.
This is pretty revolutionary as a light-year is nearly six trillion miles. The debut image combines 678 individual exposures taken over a period of seven hours.
What were previously faint or invisible features in our Milky Way can now be viewed in remarkably great detail, and lucky for us, the photos are available for free on the official Rubin Observatory website.
Another image shows a view of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies - a collection that's approximately 100 billion times the size of our entire Milky Way.
Over the next 10 years, the LSST is set to explore hidden corners of the universe we've never seen before.
The observatory is named after astronomer Vera Rubin, who provided some of the first compelling evidence of dark matter.
Researchers hope that this incredibly sensitive camera will finally yield some clues about the mysterious force, along with another puzzling phenomenon called dark energy.
The observatory has an ambitious goal to image 20 billion galaxies and discover new asteroids and other celestial objects. To achieve this, the researchers plan to capture 1,000 images per night, every three days for the next decade.
Scientists hope that the images will help scientists tackle some of the biggest questions in astronomy, such as the early formation of our Solar System.
More photos and videos from the camera are expected to be released throughout this week.
