A MEGA-MEGAPIXEL CAMERA

Digital cameras are getting better all the time. But how about 570 megapixels?
That's the resolution of the phone-booth-size Dark Energy Camera, which took its first pictures of the southern sky last month. In December, scientists will start using the camera to plumb, among other things, the nature of dark energy—considered the key to explaining the universe's accelerating expansion. The camera, created by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., is based at the National Science Foundation's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.