After decades of preparation, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images to the world in a live stream on Monday (June 23). The photos, taken by the world’s largest digital camera, are highly-detailed and show relatively large areas of the sky.
In a televised news conference, scientists from the observatory revealed new details about the images that far surpass the “sneak peek” images released earlier in the day. In fact, an awe-inspiring spiral galaxy image shared prior to the press conference on Monday only shows about 2% of the space cataloged in Rubin’s first photo of the night sky, project scientists revealed.
The full image includes 10 million galaxies in and around the Virgo Cluster, many of which have never been seen before, Zeljko Ivezic, Project Scientist at Rubin and Deputy Director of the observatory’s Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) construction project, said during the live stream.
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