A monumental moment for ground-based astronomy this month: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has officially seen its "first light."

This isn't just another large telescope; it is a survey machine.

Equipped with the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy, it will photograph the entire visible southern sky every few nights. The initial image released—a sweeping, deeply detailed view of the Virgo Cluster—is just a tiny taste of what is to come. Over its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), it is expected to catalogue billions of new galaxies and track millions of transient objects like supernovae and near-Earth asteroids every single night.

Vera Florence Cooper Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates.

https://rubinobservatory.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin