[Note: Given the timing of this release (I didn’t get all the details until Monday afternoon) and its impact, I’m sending out this issue to all subscribers, free and paid. Enjoy.]

At long last! The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is (kinda) online, and has had its first glimpse of the sky!

And oh my, what a glimpse it got.

The observatory has been decades in the making; the idea was to build a large ‘scope with a huge camera that could take images of vast swaths of the sky rapidly, not only looking deeply into the Universe but also to look for changes over short periods of time, like moving asteroids, exploding stars, variable stars (ones that change brightness over time), and the like.

Rubin (named after the wonderful astronomer Vera Rubin) is the culmination of this dream. The telescope (technically the Simonyi Survey Telescope) is a monster with an 8.4-meter mirror, and a unique design that allows it to see a circular patch of sky a staggering 3.5 degrees across at a time — about 7 times the width of the full Moon. That’s huge, about 9.6 square degrees, or 50 times the area of the Moon on the sky. And because the mirror is so large it collects a lot of light (like a bigger rain bucket collecting rain full more quickly) so it can see faint objects easily. It also has excellent resolution, technically about 0.3 arcseconds (a small angle on the sky, where there are 3,600 arcseconds in a degree) but more realistically about 0.7 due to atmospheric conditions. But still, that means it has very good resolution, and can separate objects that are very close together in the sky.

The camera is a behemoth, too, the largest ever built for astronomy. It has — get this — 3.2 billion pixels. Yes, it’s a 3.2 gigapixel camera, and it has six filters that allow it to see colors across the visible light spectrum. This is critical for IDing different kinds of galaxies and other objects that give off light in different colors. 

The construction of the observatory isn’t quite finished, but the telescope and camera are working, so astronomers took some images over the course of about a week, and have released them to the public.

And yegads they are incredible.

First up: the Virgo Cluster. This is a collection of about a thousand galaxies (!!) centered around the mighty M87, about 55 million light years away. The cluster is huge, though, stretching for many tens of millions of light years.

Here’s Rubin’s view of a small portion of it:

OK, a couple of things. First: HOLY SPRAWLING GALAXIES!

Second, I had to shrink this image to get it to fit in the newsletter. Go here to see an interactive full-res version (in fact, you can click on any of the Virgo Cluster images here to go to the interactive images, where you can pan and scan and zoom to your heart’s desire).

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Third, this shot is centered more or less on the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 4261, which is on the far side of the galaxy cluster at a distance of roughly 100 million light-years from us. It’s an active galaxy, meaning the supermassive black hole in its center is actively feeding. Material falls toward the black hole, piles up into a huge disk, and heats up a lot. The winding magnetic fields can launch material away from the disk at high speeds, and you can see these two jets to the left and right of the galaxy’s center. The one on the right eventually slows as it rams through the thin gas between galaxies and spreads out a bit, creating a small arc.

The bigger galaxies you see here are part of Virgo (or a small clutch of galaxies that orbit NGC 4261 itself). Many are much more distant background galaxies billions of light-years distant. Here’s a crop showing two galaxies to the left of NGC 4261:

That edge-on galaxy is NGC 4266, which is also an active galaxy. You can see a dark line splitting it along the middle; that’s made up of countless dust clouds that orbit along the plane of that galaxy, which is presumably a disk galaxy like the Milky Way. The weird rectangular galaxy to the left is NGC 4270, which looks like it’s had a recent collision with another galaxy; the two arcs on either side of it may be the remnants of a smaller galaxy it ate. The concentric shells around it are made up of stars affected by the collision; the collision creates a splash-like gravitational effect where stars can collect like ripples in a pond.

Oh, and fourth: that first image is a tiny fraction of the full field of view of Rubin! And by tiny, I mean about 2%. In other words, the full view is 50 times larger. Imagine how many galaxies it will see!

Here’s another section of Virgo:

This shot actually looks beyond the Virgo Cluster to what looks like a far more distant cluster of galaxies (though I’m guessing a bit based on my experience). I love the interacting galaxies in the upper right. Looks like at least a four-way collision! And wow, look at those two spirals! In fact, look at them

Those are NGC 4411 a and b, two spirals relatively close together. Look at the gorgeous structure! Mind you, each of those is similar to the Milky Way, with tens or hundreds of billions of stars in them. Each.

The final release image is a mind-flayer. When we look to the center of our own Milky Way we are looking downtown, so to speak, toward where a lot of the action is. We see a ridiculous number of gas clouds called nebulae in that direction (towards Sagittarius), many of which are easily seen by binoculars. One, called the Lagoon Nebula, is bright enough to see by naked eye despite being over 4,000 light years away! It’s a sprawling star-forming complex, lit up by massive stars being born within. I’ve seen it myself many times — it’s a favorite target for amateur astronomers — and written about it too.

But I’ve never seen it like this:

Is your mind flayed? IS IT? It should be.

This image is ridiculous. The Lagoon itself is the kidney-bean-shaped red cloud near the bottom center. That yellow glow to the left? That’s the combined light of millions of stars. If you grab the 4,000 x 2,500 pixel version you see them as individual stars. Or, if you have a lot more bandwidth than I do, there’s a 10,000 pixel TIF image that is a hefty 24 gigabytes. Enjoy that one.

The dark threads are streamers of dust, clouds of tiny grains of rock or soot expelled by massive stars as they die. That material is opaque, so it blocks the light of material and stars behind.

Speaking of which, above it and to the right of the Lagoon is the gorgeous Trifid Nebula, so called because dark dust lanes trisect it. The red part is glowing hydrogen gas lit up by bright stars, and the blue part above it is dust reflecting the light from those massive, blue stars.

Here’s the Trifid cropped so you can see it better:

Incredible. Just stunning.

 And remember, all this is before Rubin is fully operational. In a few months it will begin routine science observations, taking huge images of the sky that astronomers are positively drooling to get their brains on. When it dos, the images will be fantastic, the science critical, and the knowledge we will be able to derive from them inspirational. Stay tuned. We’re just getting started.

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