Work on the camera for the future Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has reached a major milestone with the completion and delivery of the camera’s fully integrated cryostat. With 3.2 gigapixels, the LSST camera will be the largest digital camera ever built for ground-based astronomy. It’s being assembled at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
More than halfway across the universe, an enormous blue star nicknamed Icarus is the farthest individual star ever seen. Normally, it would be much too faint to view, even with the world’s largest telescopes. Through a quirk of nature that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow, however, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to pinpoint this faraway star. They also used Icarus to test a theory of dark matter, and to probe the makeup of a foreground galaxy cluster.
