All Six Camera Filters are Complete

After nearly a decade of work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), all six of the filters for the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera are finished! They have been delivered to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is where they’ll be installed on the camera for testing. Once that’s done everything will be taken apart, carefully packed, and then shipped to the observatory in Chile. The six filters have their own special storage case that will protect them on the journey.

The filters are labeled u, g, r, i, z, and y, and each transmits light from a different band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The filters will be installed in a carousel, and changed periodically as the camera takes images of the sky.

The 3200-megapixel camera at Rubin Observatory is the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy. In turn, the six filters are some of the largest optical filters ever produced. Each filter is about 76 centimeters (30 inches) wide and weighs about 40 kilograms (90 pounds), ranging in thickness from 13 millimeters (about a half inch) to 26 millimeters (one inch).

Rubin Observatory will image the entire sky visible from its location on Cerro Pachón in Chile every few nights. Images taken through these six filters will reveal details of the Universe we’ve never seen before!