Every three nights, the proposed telescope will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky. LSST will open a window on objects that change or move on rapid time scales.

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Donations of $30 million to the Tucson-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project announced Thursday will be used to build the large core mirrors of the instrument, which will continuously scan and capture the night sky with the world's biggest digital camera.

The donations — $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates — represent some of the largest fundraising efforts to date for the $400 million telescope, which is expected to see "first light" atop the Cerro Pachón peak in northern Chile in 2014.

Gates called the telescope a "shared resource for all humanity" and "the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe," according to a statement announcing the gift.

"LSST is just as imaginative in its technology and approach as it is with its science mission," Gates wrote. "LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it."

A terabyte equals about 1,000 gigabytes of data.

Simonyi stated that the ability to gather floods of real-time data will create a new paradigm for observing the dynamics of the universe.

"What a shock it was when Galileo saw in his telescope the phases of Venus, or the moons of Jupiter, the first hints of a dynamic universe," wrote Simonyi, a software executive and space tourist. "Today, by building a special telescope-computer complex, we can study this dynamism in unprecedented detail. LSST will produce a database suitable for answering a wide range of pressing questions: What is dark energy? What is dark matter? How did the Milky Way form?"

The LSST Corp., a public-private partnership headquartered in Tucson, has 23 institutional partners and more than 100 affiliated scientists. The University of Arizona is among four founding partners, including Research Corp. and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, both in Tucson, and the University of Washington.

The $30 million in donations will support construction of the three LSST mirrors — including the main 8.4-meter mirror now in its first stages of development at the UA's Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory. The mirrors will take more than five years to complete and the telescope's 3,200-megapixel camera will be the largest digital camera ever constructed.

"In the first month of operation, this telescope will gather more information about stars and galaxies than all other telescopes in existence since the beginning of time," said John P. Schaefer, president of the LSST Corp. board of directors.

LSST officials have been using the phrase "the greatest movie of all time" for what will become of the 30 terabytes of data the telescope will produce every night. Unlike most telescopes, the LSST will focus on wide areas, imaging segments of the night sky roughly the size of nine full moons every 15 seconds for 10 years, producing a total of 150 petabytes of information that will be the world's largest database, Schaefer said.

"We'll discover things that no one has ever dreamed about," he said. "There will be new ideas that evolve about what we should be doing next."

A petabyte equals about 1,000 terabytes.

The UA-designed scope has already secured a $14.2 million federal design and development grant and raised about $25 million in private donations prior to the Simonyi and Gates gifts.

The Cerro Pachón site was selected after a two-year study of atmospheric conditions and quality of astronomical "seeing" at four sites in Chile, Mexico and the Canary Islands. The existing observatory will provide the necessary infrastructure and access to fiber-optic links the LSST will need.

All of the data and resulting catalogs will be made available to the public with no proprietary restrictions. Internet search giant Google has signed on as a partner and will help manage the volumes of data produced by the scope's nightly scans.

"The pictures will be taken rapidly enough you can piece them together like a flip book," said Suzanne H. Jacoby, LSST manager for education and public outreach. "Each spot on the sky will have thousands of pages in its flip book and it easily allows you to see anything that has changed in the sky."

The bulk of the $400 million needed for the telescope is expected to come from the National Science Foundation by about 2011, Jacoby said. Research and development work on the LSST is also being funded through three Department of Energy labs and other DOE grants to universities. Private fundraising will continue, but the Simonyi and Gates gifts are big compliments to the project, she said.

"We're just flattered that people of this caliber will give money to this project," Jacoby said. "It means a lot that people with this sense of innovation feel that LSST is something worth investing in."