Images from the world’s largest camera, built in the Bay Area, are providing a first-of-its-kind window across deep space. Over the next decade, the device, mounted on a telescope in Chile, is expected to fuel new discoveries by scientists and ultimately deliver a time-lapse view of a huge swath of the known universe.

“We are going to produce the greatest astronomical movie ever made,” said Phil Marshall, a senior staff scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, where the camera was built.

The Hubble Space Telescope provides more detail, and the Webb Space Telescope looks deeper into space, but both orbiting instruments have a comparatively tiny field of view.

By contrast, the terrestrial Rubin Observatory telescope and Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera can reach more than halfway across the universe. By gathering images of the whole southern night sky every three days, they provide a much broader view of the cosmos than has ever been achieved before.

“This will map, really, half the sky,” said Risa Wechsler, director of Stanford University’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.

A decade in the making, the $168 million, 6,600-pound camera with a lens five feet across was completed last spring. It was shipped in a secretive, intricately orchestrated mission to the Rubin Observatory on a mountaintop 8,900 feet above sea level, north of Chile’s capital, Santiago.

Marshall described the camera as a “discovery machine,” and its output as a “cosmic treasure chest.” At SLAC on Monday, he pointed to one of the first images released, an image dense with a multitude of shining dots and radiant swirls.

“Pretty much every speck of light you see is a distant galaxy, each one containing billions of stars,” Marshall said.

Scientists will be able to spot exploding stars and identify new asteroids — more than 2,000 were found in the camera’s first week. They will gain insights into black holes and the evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and work toward understanding mysterious, cosmos-shaping “dark matter,” and the “dark energy” believed responsible for accelerating the universe’s expansion.

The camera, now bolted to the end of a giant telescope at the Rubin Observatory, is expected to shoot photos of 20 billion galaxies, to be stitched together in broad panoramas giving astronomers “the ability to see deeply and widely, really in a way that hasn’t been done before,” Marshall said.

“Rubin was built differently,” Marshall said. “It was built to survey the sky wide, fast and deep and build up this enormous dataset for the whole astronomy community to use.”

SLAC, with its famous linear accelerator used to find the tiniest particles in the universe, is known for building large, sophisticated machines using X-rays, lasers, and electron beams to untangle enigmas on Earth and in the cosmos. The Rubin Observatory is named for Vera C. Rubin, a pioneering astronomer who died in 2016.

Every night, data from the SLAC-build camera will be sent from Chile to SLAC, where staff will process it and notify scientists around the world about everything that changed since the last imagery was taken. Differences in the color, brightness and positions of stars and galaxies deliver insights into the universe’s properties and processes. Newly exploding stars, or collapsed “neutron stars,” are among the celestial phenomena that will garner instant attention in observatories and laboratories far and wide.

The speed at which the telescope, camera and software can operate means when something unusual pops up, scientists can start delving into it nearly immediately, especially important with fleeting phenomena.

“Some things are so rare and so interesting that we are actually going to want to point every other telescope in the world, and in space, at those objects,” said Wechsler.

Imagery from the camera will enable intensive research into known aspects of the universe and, “we also want to study everything that’s weird,” Wechsler said.

The camera and observatory are primarily a U.S. government project, with the Department of Energy paying around $700 million for the construction of the camera and the National Science Foundation spending more than $500 million for the observatory. The unveiling of initial imagery comes as the administration of President Donald Trump has proposed a budget that would slash NSF funding by more than half.

Officials at SLAC said they did not want to speculate about future funding.

“We’ve been extraordinarily grateful for the support we’ve had from both federal agencies so far,” Marshall said. “They enable this kind of big science in a way that no one else can.”

SLAC engineer Margaux Lopez, who led the operation to pack up and ship the camera to the observatory, said she was grateful for the opportunity to carry on the legacy of Rubin, who overcame obstacles facing women in science and produced groundbreaking research into dark matter.

“It’s wild,” Lopez said after viewing the first images from the camera. “It’s very cool to see the fruits of our labor.”

Eli Rykoff, a SLAC scientist who works with outputs from the camera, said he was excited to be able to look so deeply into the universe.

“You can just get lost in it,” Rykoff said.