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The Vera Rubin Telescope Begins Surveying Our Cosmos (nytimes.com) 65

Posted by BeauHD from the gold-mine-for-science dept.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, using the world's largest digital camera to image the entire southern sky every few nights. The project is expected to catalog billions of stars and galaxies, track changing and transient objects, and generate an enormous dataset for studying dark matter, galaxy formation, asteroids, and unexpected cosmic phenomena. The New York Times reports: "This is the end of a 30-year wait," said Phil Marshall, the deputy director of the telescope's operations at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, in a statement to The New York Times. "It's a major milestone for us." Astronomers expect this collection of data, known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, to revolutionize their knowledge of our galaxy's birth, the invisible matter permeating the cosmos, what shaped the universe into the structure it has today and more. According to Dr. Marshall, the survey is designed to see everything, "even the things we don't know we're looking for yet," he said.

The team behind the observatory, a joint effort funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, unveiled several images of the cosmos that were jampacked with celestial goodness -- a peek at what the Rubin could do -- last year. Since then, scientists have been busy conducting final tests and reviews of the telescope's operations and systems. According to Bob Blum, the director of Rubin operations at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, the team has also been hard at work ensuring that the telescope can operate reliably in different environmental conditions for the next decade.
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The Vera Rubin Telescope Begins Surveying Our Cosmos More

The Vera Rubin Telescope Begins Surveying Our Cosmos

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  • Keep it quiet (Score:3, Insightful)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @08:48AM (#66218112) Journal
    Please keep it quiet, otherwise the anti-DEI police of the current Administration will force it to close down, and probably douse it in acid, just for the crime of being named for a (qualified, historic, accomplished [wikipedia.org]) woman.

    Or, they'll go after it for the same reason they went after the ocean monitoring system: they don't want people asking questions the Administration doesn't want the answers to. Don't Look Up [imdb.com] was supposed to be a parable, not an instruction manual.
    • They'll probably just confuse it with the NVIDIA AI systems of the same name anyway.

  • How will its images compare to Hubble? (Score:5, Informative)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @10:59AM (#66218242)

    Wider field of view, vastly more data (time-lapse survey of entire sky every few nights), but lower angular resolution than Hubble's sharp, targeted deep-space images.

    How does it compare to other ground based telescopes?
    Largest wide-field survey telescope (8.4m mirror, 3.2 gigapixel camera). Faster and broader than most ground-based (e.g., Subaru, VISTA), but lower resolution than adaptive-optics giants like Keck or ELT.

    • It has the great advantage of being above the atmosphere and the lights of earth. That should more than make up for any lower resolution.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        It's not the highest scope in the world, but its forte is mass surveys, not resolution, so it doesn't have to try to compete with Hubble. If it finds something interesting, then another resolution-oriented scope can zoom in.

        It's great for finding moving and flashing things, as it allows automated comparisons over time of most the sky. This scope might even find Planet X, although let's not call it Planet X because Elon tainted X things. Call it Planet NoElon.

    • but lower angular resolution than Hubble's sharp, targeted deep-space images.

      Not everything is about angular resolution. The Hubble is an old hat now. Let's talk JWST instead, that thing has an insane angular resolution. However it would be absolutely useless for the purposes of a sky survey. Much like a hammer is not a very useful tool for screwing a screw.

    • They have different purposes. Rubin is a "survey" observatory meaning it is wide and scans sky very fast (whole southern sky in 3 nights). One of its main objectives is to detect that something has changed on the sky, so that other more specialized high-resolution telescopes could stare at that piece of sky for longer.

  • Cue Elvis... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @11:39AM (#66218342)

    "Thank you Vera much."

  • Why did they use that term? I don't know about y'all, but when I encounter "legacy" it usually means "old and forgotten, or old but kept because we have to keep it."

    • Google AI guesses that "The word 'legacy' was specifically chosen to emphasize the long-term, foundational value of the project." Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] tells a different story: "The telescope was originally named the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope .... In June 2019, the observatory was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory as proposed by United States Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson and Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon. ... The telescope itself is named the Simonyi Survey Telescope,

      • "Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million SEK (c. US$186 million, €150 million in 2008), to establish the five Nobel Prizes"

        THAT is why they are callled "Nobel prizes".

        The Rubin bint got dug up by DEI hires Eddie Bernice Johnson and Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon not because they are into science, but because they wanted to push their pathetic woke agenda and pretend women did as much in astronomy as men.
        They did not.

        Calling it the "Vera Q. Rubin Observatory" is a politicization of science.
        Ju

  • Watching animations on their site of asteroids the first thing that popped into my head they found all the Starlink satellites but no just real asteroids.

    Interesting they have a github repo /w the software that runs the telescope.
    https://github.com/lsst-ts [github.com]

  • Impressive telescope (Score:4, Informative)

    by brebisson ( 4004735 ) on Thursday July 02, 2026 @02:41AM (#66219432)

    Hello,

    This telescope is a monster...

    It is designed to have a very wide view as opposed to other telescopes like hubble or the other bround based Giants.

    This means that it can take a full picture of the sky every 15 days or so. (but with lower precision).

    It has the largest "camera" in astronomy, made in fact of plenty of smaller cameras...

    It has a trully amazing primary/tertiarry mirror, all in one.
    This means that the main mirror, a 8m peice of glass has 2 parts, one with a given curvature (an "outside" ring) which acts as a primary mirror, while the second part, in the center acts as a tertiary mirror.

    Most modern telescope use a 3 mirror configuration to correct for optical issues (Hubble only has 2).

    Trully a marvel or engineering and a great thing for research! Yeha!
    Cyrille

  • 40% chance this project gets axed like the ocean monitoring system because science is deemed "woke".
  • In January at AAS Eric Schmidt unveiled 4 new scopes he funds. Argus array is 1200 280mm Planewave CDK arranged in an array. Each with their own Sony camera and focuser. https://argus.unc.edu/ [unc.edu] It’s supposed to do what Rubin does but with off the shelf parts. This also means it s ready much faster, 2-3 year. Main driver is trying to use AI to reduce the size of the data received.

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