from Hacker News

Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

by phsilva on 6/23/25, 3:41 PM with 165 comments

  • by dekhn on 6/23/25, 6:05 PM

    I really like the Rubin because I think a lot of people focus too much on "deep" seeing (IE, looking at individual or several objects with very high magnification only once). The Rubin does much more "wide" seeing and this actually produces a ton of useful data- basically, enough data to collect reliable statistics about things. This helps refine cosmological models in ways that smaller individual observations cannot.

    What's amazing to me is just how long it took to get to first photo- I was working on the design of the LSST scope well over 10 years ago, and the project had been underway for some time before that. It's hard to keep attention on projects for that long when a company can IPO and make billions in just a few years.

  • by krunck on 6/23/25, 7:19 PM

    The asteroid detection capability is amazing: https://rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-first-look/swarm-ast...

  • by jcims on 6/23/25, 10:24 PM

    The wikipedia article is quite good - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory (Edit: Treasure trove of details in the references if any of your interests are adjacent to this)

    The image of the woman holding the model of the sensor is nice because it includes a moon for scale.

    Question I was curious about is whether or not the focal plane was flat (it is).

    This is an interesting tidbit:

    > Once images are taken, they are processed according to three different timescales, prompt (within 60 seconds), daily, and annually.

    > The prompt products are alerts, issued within 60 seconds of observation, about objects that have changed brightness or position relative to archived images of that sky position. Transferring, processing, and differencing such large images within 60 seconds (previous methods took hours, on smaller images) is a significant software engineering problem by itself. This stage of processing will be performed at a classified government facility so events that would reveal secret assets can be edited out.

    They are estimating 10 million alerts per night, which will be released publicly after the previously mentioned assessment takes place.

  • by binarystargazer on 6/24/25, 1:25 PM

    I'm the Rubin team member responsible for mapping the data into RGB images. I have been a long time reader of hacker news, but finally made an account to comment on this. I wanted to thank everyone here for their interest and taking their time to check out these images. Seeing everyone interested and engaged makes all the long hours worth it.

  • by mjsweet on 6/23/25, 11:07 PM

    Back in January 2010 I went on a blind date with a lady who’s now my wife — an astrophysicist. We talked about this instrument and how Google would shuffle petabytes of raw observations, then distilling them into datasets researchers could actually use (don't know if Google is still involved?). We’ll celebrate 15 years of marriage this January, and I have been following the progress of this telescope since 2007 or so. It's amazing how long it takes for these instruments to come online, but the benefits are significant.

  • by perihelions on 6/23/25, 4:41 PM

    Here's the SDSS view[0] of this featured[1] section from the Virgo Cluster, in comparison, to put the staggering depth of these exposures in their proper context,

    [0] https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/?target=12%2026%205...

    [1] https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery/collections/first-look-...

  • by WD-42 on 6/23/25, 9:28 PM

    The amount of data this thing will be putting out every night is insane. For years now the community has been building the infrastructure to be able to efficiently consume it for useful science, but we still have work to do. Anyone interested in the problem of pipelining and distributing 10s of TB of data a night should check out the LSST and related GitHubs.

  • by NitpickLawyer on 6/23/25, 3:58 PM

    So stoked for this observatory to go online! One cool uses it'll excel at is taking "deltas" between images and detect moving stuff. Close asteroids is one obvious goal, but I'm more interested in the next Oumuamua / Borisov like objects that come in from interstellar space. It would be amazing to get early warnings about those, and be able to study them with other powerful telescopes we have now.

  • by -warren on 6/23/25, 8:31 PM

    Counter-rotating spiral galaxies. Super neat! https://skyviewer.app/embed?target=186.66721+8.89072&fov=0.2...

  • by Helmut10001 on 6/24/25, 3:55 AM

  • by 0x0203 on 6/24/25, 10:54 AM

    Why do the brighter objects have the four way cross artifact? My (apparently incorrect) understanding was that those types of artifacts were a result of support structures holding reflecting mirrors on a telescope. But this camera just has a "standard" glass lense with nothing obstructing the light path to the sensor.

  • by ludsan on 6/23/25, 10:12 PM

  • by phsilva on 6/23/25, 3:48 PM

  • by kdamica on 6/23/25, 9:17 PM

    My God, it's full of stars

  • by runako on 6/23/25, 9:38 PM

    Every set of deep field imagery reminds me that any point of light we see could be a star, a galaxy, or a cluster of galaxies. The universe is unimaginably vast.

    For observatories like Rubin, is there a plan for keeping them open after the funding ends? Is it feasible for Chile to take over the project and keep it going?

    On a practical note, what happens to a facility like this if one day it's just locked up? Will it degrade without routine maintenance, or will it still be operational in the event someone can put together funding?

  • by throw0101c on 6/24/25, 1:32 AM

    PetaPixel has a decent article / video on the topic from a visit to the observatory:

    * https://petapixel.com/2025/06/23/hands-on-at-the-vera-c-rubi...

    Not super technical, but a little higher level (with decent analogies to photography, for their traditional audience).

  • by gattr on 6/24/25, 7:43 AM

    Related: When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk [1];

    TL;DR: VCRO is capable of imaging spy- and other classified US satellites. An automated filtering system (involves routing through some government processing facility) is in place to remove them from the freshly captured raw data used for the public transient phenomena alert service. 3 days later, unredacted data is made available (by then the elusive, variable-orbit assets are long gone.)

    [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...

  • by dang on 6/23/25, 7:56 PM

  • by ramijames on 6/23/25, 8:57 PM

    I was surprised by how many lensed objects I could spot.

  • by mapt on 6/23/25, 10:09 PM

    Even one zoom-in and I find something interesting.

    What's that faint illuminated tendril extending from M61 (the large spiral galaxy at the bottom center of the image) upwards towards that red giant? It seems too straight and off-center to be an extension of the spiral arm.

    EDIT: The supposed "Tidal tail" on M61 was evidently known from deep astrophotography, but only rarely detected & commented upon.

  • by w10-1 on 6/23/25, 9:57 PM

    The zoomed images look grainy as one would expect from raw data, but I would have expected them to do dark field subtraction for the chips to minimize this effect. Does anyone know if that's done (or expressly avoided) in this context, or why it might not be as helpful (e.g., for longer exposures)?

  • by keyle on 6/24/25, 6:11 AM

    Petition to name those two mirrored galaxies "Wax on" and "wax off"?

    I'll see myself out.

  • by funkypants on 6/24/25, 9:51 AM

  • by nvk255 on 6/24/25, 5:54 AM

  • by jasonthorsness on 6/23/25, 4:05 PM

    Why are there lens-flare-like artifacts around some of the bright objects?

  • by royal__ on 6/23/25, 11:00 PM

    "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

  • by KurSix on 6/24/25, 1:13 PM

    The potential for discoveries here seems enormous

  • by matiascoin on 6/24/25, 3:02 PM

    Amazing

  • by botswana99 on 6/23/25, 10:15 PM

    Jesus H Christ, the Universe is big.