Fermilab builds massive 570-megapixel camera to hunt dark energy

You think that http://dvice.com/archives/2009/09/canon-eos-7d-al.php - Canon DSLR you got for Christmas has a lot of megapixels? Try this: The camera made for the http://www.darkenergysurvey.org/ - Dark Energy Survey is the size of a car and captures images with 570 megapixels. Created from 74 individual CCDs, the image sensor is over three feet in diameter. Even with the camera's sophisticated data-acquisition system, each photo is so big that it takes 17 seconds to capture.

That might lead to some serious motion blur if the camera were made for taking pictures of anything other than distant galaxies. The Dark Energy Survey is a Fermilab project with the goal of discovering evidence of dark energy, the still-theoretical phenomenon that's probably responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion. I'm no investigative physicist (bad decisions in my last year of college), but tracking 300 million galaxies with the most colossal digital camera every made sounds like a pretty good way to start looking for it.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/st_darkenergy_camera/ - Wired , via http://gizmodo.com/5447137/570+megapixel-digital-camera-is-the-mother-and-the-father-of-all-cameras - Gizmodo