The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has unveiled its first images, leaving astronomers in awe of the unprecedented capabilities of the observatory’s 3,200 megapixel digital camera — the largest in the world. The images were created from shots taken during a trial that started in April, when construction of the telescope was completed.
“Wow. You want to observe the grandeur of the Universe? This is the way to observe it!” says astronomer Robert Williams, former head of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
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One of the images shows the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula, in a region of the Milky Way that is dense with ionized hydrogen and with young stars or those in the process of forming. The picture was created from 678 separate exposures taken by the observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope in just over seven hours. Each image was monochromatic and taken with one of four filters, resulting in the rich colours of the final product.
The Rubin, which sits atop Cerro Pachón in the Andes Mountains in central Chile, is a US$810 million, US-led facility. The observatory has a very large field of view that will be able to cover the entire southern sky every 3–4 nights. Other telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, have superior sensitivity to tiny details and take in one small section of the sky at a time.
The latest images were put together mainly for aesthetic impact and to showcase how the observatory’s digital camera can scan large swaths of sky with high sensitivity and in a short time. As such, they are quite different from the type of ‘data products’ that astronomers around the world will use for research purposes, says Sandrine Thomas, deputy director for the observatory’s construction, who is based in Tucson, Arizona. And yet, they are a reminder of what drives astronomers in the first place. “We go into astronomy because we like to look at the sky — and at the beauty of it,” she says.
