It was not that long ago that astronomers would spend a night looking through a telescope, making careful observations of one or a few points of light.

Based on those few observations, they would extrapolate broad generalizations about the universe.

“It was all people could really do at the time, because it was hard to collect data,” said Leanne Guy, the data management scientist at the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

Rubin, located in Chile and financed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, will inundate astronomers with data.

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.