World's most powerful telescope is about to drop its first pictures. How to watch
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "World's most powerful telescope is about to drop its first pictures. How to watch")
Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. (Photo: AFP)
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile houses the world's most powerful survey telescope with the largest digital camera ever built by humans, and it is about to drop its first pictures.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile houses the world's most powerful survey telescope with the largest digital camera ever built by humans, and it is about to drop its first pictures. The US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy will reveal the telescope's first observations on June 23. It will be the start of a whole new era in astronomy and the human quest to know what lies beyond Earth. Rubin has been in the works for 20 years after being first proposed in 2001. It will capture images of the sky regularly and piece together a huge time-lapse of its observations. This will happen over a period of 10 years, where it will survey the southern sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared wavelengths.
The telescope has a 3,200-megapixel camera, which it will use to scan each section of the sky 800 times. A whopping 20 terabytes of data will be generated every 24 hours. When it carries out LSST, it will gather nearly 60 petabytes of raw image data. This is almost double of what the Murchison Widefield Array collected during the same time frame.
Scientists are psyched about Rubin and believe it will capture amazing things in the universe, things that have never been seen till now, and answer questions that humans haven't even thought about yet. "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 said.
"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."
The Rubin release is such a huge event that astronomy enthusiasts are organising watch parties to let people get the first look at images released by the telescope. It is scheduled to happen on June 23, 2025, at 11:00 ET, or 8:30 pm IST. It will also be available on YouTube on the Rubin Observatory channel.
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