Google announced plans last week to join Stanford and 18 other universities in the construction of a telescope with a three-billion pixel digital camera —the largest such camera ever built — which will be able to survey the entire visible sky every three nights for a ten-year period when it is completed in 2013.

The Google partnership is intended to organize and index the massive amount of information generated by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), as well as process and analyze data non-stop so that it can be made available as soon as it is discovered. The data will not only aid scientists and astronomers but will also provide a dynamic new view of the night sky to the public.

“Google’s mission is to take the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Google Vice President of Engineering William Coughran in a statement. “The data from the LSST will be an important part of this information, and by being involved in the project we hope to make it easier for that data to become accessible and useful.”

LSST Project Manager Donald Sweeney said the effort signaled a new era.

“Even though the universe is very old, exciting things happen every second,” he said in a press release. “The LSST will be able to find these events hundreds of times better than today’s other big telescopes. Google will help us organize and present the seemingly overwhelming volumes of data collected by the LSST.”

The telescope will use a color mapping technique to provide a movie-like view of rapidly changing objects, such as exploding supernovae and potentially hazardous asteroids. The camera — approximately the size of an SUV — will provide images of a few billion galaxies, and an equal number of stars, said Physics Prof. Steven Kahn, who serves as the deputy project director and camera scientist for the LSST project.

“LSST will provide valuable insight into the history of cosmic expansion, from the Big Bang to the present,” Kahn said.

The LSST Corporation was formed in 2003 by the University of Arizona and the University of Washington as a non-profit. The project has grown to receive the support of 17 other universities, including Stanford, and numerous private parties. As a public-private partnership, the data gathered by the project will be made available to the public.