The SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey III) is a digital camera that is being retired to the Smithsonian as part of its astronomy collection. It is the world’s largest digital camera, at 138-megapixels, attached to a 2.5-metre telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
In 1998, it started capturing data (144 pieces of information for every galaxy) such as name, position in the sky, colour and shape of every galaxy in the observed universe. Out of all this data, astronomers have pieced together the largest digital colour picture ever made of the night sky — built from more than a trillion pixels.
Read the article at: Toronto Star.