On Monday (June 23), the public and the wider science community will get their first look at images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This will arguably mark the biggest moment in astronomy since the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were revealed in the summer of 2022.
Rubin was built by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science on the mountain Cerro Pachón, high in the dry atmosphere of northern Chile. When its operational, the observatory will construct what Director of Rubin Observatory's construction, Željko Ivezić, described as the "greatest movie of all time and the most informative map of the night sky ever assembled."
The 8.4-meter telescope, equipped with the largest digital camera ever, will conduct the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), capturing the entire southern sky over Earth every 3 nights.
