Credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory“In a lot of ways, it almost doesn’t matter where we look,” said Aaron Roodman, a physicist at Stanford University and program lead for the Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera, in a preview press conference held on June 9.“We’re going to see changing objects; we’re going to see moving objects; we’re going to get a view of thousands and thousands of galaxies of stars in any field we look at,” he said. “In some sense, we could have looked anywhere and gotten fantastic images.”In the end, the team decided to share several mosaics of images from the observatory that highlight its extremely wide field of view, which can capture multiple alluring targets in a single snapshot.This image combines 678 separate images taken by NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in just over seven hours of observing time. Combining many images in this way clearly reveals otherwise faint or invisible details, such as the clouds of gas and dust that comprise the Trifid nebula (top right) and the Lagoon nebula, which are several thousand light-years away from Earth.NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin ObservatoryThe view above of the Triffid Nebula (top right) and Lagoon Nebula includes data from 678 individual images captured by the Rubin Observatory. Scientists stack and combine images in this way to see farther and fainter into the universe. The Triffid Nebula, also known as M20, and the Lagoon Nebula, also known as M8, are star-forming regions both located several thousand light-years away from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius.The observatory also captured an initial view of the Virgo Cluster, a massive clump of galaxies located in the constellation of the same name. Individual detail images (at top and below) show a mix of bright Milky Way stars against a backdrop of myriad more distant galaxies. In addition, the team has released a teaser video of a stunning zoomable view of some 10 million galaxies that was created by combining some 1,100 images taken by the new observatory.This image shows a small section of NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's total view of the Virgo cluster. Bright stars in the Milky Way galaxy shine in the foreground, and many distant galaxies are in the background.NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin ObservatoryThe Rubin Observatory has promised to reveal additional imagery during the unveiling event later today, including the full video of the massive view of countless galaxies and another video depicting the more than 2,000 asteroids the telescope has already discovered in just 10 hours of observations.These first glimpses from Rubin showcase the observatory’s unprecedented discovery power. The telescope will survey the entire southern sky about once every three days, creating movies of the cosmos in full color and jaw-dropping detail.“We’ve been working on this for so many years now,” says Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and the Rubin Observatory’s deputy associate director for data management. “I can’t believe this moment has finally come.”Rights & PermissionsMeghan Bartels is a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Scientific American in 2023 and is now a senior news reporter there. Previously, she spent more than four years as a writer and editor at Space.com, as well as nearly a year as a science reporter at Newsweek, where she focused on space and Earth science. Her writing has also appeared in Audubon, Nautilus, Astronomy and Smithsonian, among other publications. She attended Georgetown University and earned a master’s degree in journalism at New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.Subscribe to Scientific American to learn and share the most exciting discoveries, innovations and ideas shaping our world today.Subscription PlansGive a Gift SubscriptionExplore SciAmLatest IssueNewsOpinionNewslettersPodcastsGamesTravelCompanyAboutPress RoomFAQsContact UsStandards & EthicsInternational EditionsAdvertiseMoreAccessibilityTerms of UsePrivacy PolicyCalifornia Consumer Privacy StatementUse of cookies/Do not sell my dataReturn & Refund PolicyScientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.© 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, A DIVISION OF SPRINGER NATURE AMERICA, INC.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED., The long-awaited Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a cutting-edge new telescope perched atop a mountain in Chile, is releasing its first images of the universe on June 23—and its views are just as jaw , Since then, engineers and scientists at Rubin have been working to calibrate and fine-tune the complex telescope. Science operations and the 10-year survey will kick off in earnest around October .