The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is “a proposed ground-based 6.7 meter effective diameter (8.4 meter primary mirror), 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night.” What’s that mean? Well, it means, if it’s built, we’ll have a telescope attempting to catalog the entire night sky into an absolutely massive 150 petabyte database. Awesome!

The LSST isn’t slated to open up shop until 2016, but when it does, it’ll record a whopping 30TB of data a night by aiming itself into the sky and recording what it sees. It’ll be used to “trace billions of remote galaxies and measure the distortions in their shapes produced by lumps of Dark Matter, providing multiple tests of the mysterious Dark Energy.”

Via Gizmodo