Kenneth Chang, writing for the New York Times:

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.

It is going to be incredible seeing what we learn from these images. I would love to see an entirely separate story focused on this short passage:

Maintaining the nearly 60 miles of fiber-optic cables that connect the observatory to the city of La Serena, Chile, can be challenging. People have stolen equipment. A fire on the road and a truck hitting a pole have caused outages. Dr. O’Mullane said that once someone used a cable for shooting practice.

☄️🔭🏜️