First look through Rubin Observatory Lens, in Chile

23 Jun 2025

“Cosmic movies” are set to shake up the astronomy world.

From Ford Burkhart in Tucson

“First look” sky images from the revolutionary Rubin Observatory, which is located on a mountaintop in Chile, are expected today, Monday, June 23, part of a global project employing the largest camera ever constructed, using 3 billion pixels.

Rubin observatory, positioned on a mountain called Cerro Pachón, will offer an unprecedented cosmic movie of the southern sky as it repeatedly scans for ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse images.

“This is the moment we’ve all been working toward — the first glimpse of the universe through Rubin’s eyes,” said Željko Ivezić, Rubin Observatory Construction Director. “I can’t wait to share it with the world.”

Ivezic spoke from Seattle where he is also a professor at University of Washington.

The Rubin team in central Chile is operating with cooperation from a vast global network with major centers in Lyon, France; in the United Kingdom; at SLAC at Stanford University and the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Watch Rubin live

Citizens and scientists everywhere can watch the first images pour in by tuning in to https://ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream.

Rubin Observatory staff said scientists around the globe were signed up for virtual “watch parties” at 300 locations on Monday. The NSF said a test image from the Rubin at full size would cover nearly 400 4K TV screens.

The facility, formally known as the Vera Rubin Observatory, is run by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and US Department of Energy (DOE). It is coordinated by the NOIRLab (formally the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, based in Washington and Tucson) and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

The Rubin partnership includes: NSF NOIRLab, the U.S. National Science Foundation center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, which operates the International Gemini Observatory; NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory; NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory; the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC); and the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in cooperation with DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

Rubin, with support from the NSF and U.S. Department of Energy will commence operations late this year. Its goal is to promote “understanding of the Universe by exploring significant areas of astrophysics, including dark energy and dark matter, galaxies and quasars, the Milky Way, exoplanets, and small bodies in our own Solar System.”

The construction phase has had a price tag of approximately $800 million, the New York Times reported. It said the operating costs for the expected 10-year lifespan of the American-funded facility could run another $800 million. Rubin says it will record some 17 billion distant suns and catalog them for scientists and followers who use Rubin’s data. As well as 20 billion galaxies.

The nightly harvest of data will be some 20 terabytes, which will be made available to a team of scientists and engineers, with support from Google Cloud. The project was formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope but was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in 2019. The Telescope was named the Simonyi Survey Telescope in 2023, the LSST acronym was repurposed to stand for the 10 year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

Rubin says it will use a 3.2-gigapixel camera on a telescope to create its movie of the universe. This, it says, will let scientists “address fundamental questions about dark energy, dark matter, the Milky Way, and the solar system.”

The camera will convert the images into digital data to be sent to partner labs in the United Kingdom, France and at SLAC in Menlo Park, California. Rubin said its new process involves “a cloud-based way of storing and accessing astronomy data” and through the Rubin Science Platform will open the science “to a much bigger group of people than could access it otherwise.”

Rubin has invited everyone to take part in the image reveal on Monday, via an internet connection, and they will allow the public to interact with Rubin data using easy-to-navigate tools like the Skyviewer, which will be available at rubinobservatory.org.

Rubin Observatory said the new motion picture of the southern sky will help to “understand the nature of dark matter, the invisible glue holding our universe together, as well as dark energy, the unknown force pulling the cosmos apart. That trove of data will also reveal the story of our galaxy’s birth and become a catalog of astroids and comets in our solar system that could one day be hazardous to Earth.”

Once called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the observatory was given a new name in 2019 to honor Vera C. Rubin, whose work convinced astronomers of the existence of dark matter. She died in 2016 at age 88.