After more than 20 years in the making, we’re finally about to see the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, an astronomical facility with the largest digital camera ever built by humans.
On 23 June 2025, at 15:00 UTC (11:00 EDT), the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy will reveal the telescope’s first observations, kicking off a whole new era in studying the skies.
Perhaps the best part is, live watch parties will be taking place all over the world, and the entire event will be livestreamed on YouTube – you can tune in below.
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Rubin was first proposed in 2001, and is expected to do great things. The observatory telescope will perform a 10-year survey of the southern sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared wavelengths, capturing the entire sky every few days to basically compile a huge timelapse of the Universe.
Each section of the sky will be recorded around 800 times using the telescope’s 3,200-megapixel camera.
Every 24 hours, Rubin will generate about 20 terabytes of data. During the LSST, it’s expected to collect some 60 petabytes of raw image data, around double the data collected by the Murchison Widefield Array during the same time frame.
This incredible capacity requires cutting-edge data transfer, processing, and storage facilities in and of itself.
Safe to say that astronomers are super hyped. We anticipate that Rubin is going to show us things about the Universe and answer questions that we haven’t even begun to imagine.
“Rubin’s combination of speed, wide field of view, and sensitive camera expands the limits of what a telescope can do,” the NSF and DOE assert.
“No other telescope has been able to detect both real-time changes in the sky and faint or distant objects at the same time on this enormous scale. These capabilities mean that exceedingly rare events in the sky, never detected before, will be captured for the first time.”
You can tune into the event next week at the YouTube embed above, or check the Watch Party website to find an event near you.
