What's amazing to me is just how long it took to get to first photo- I was working on the design of the LSST scope well over 10 years ago, and the project had been underway for some time before that. It's hard to keep attention on projects for that long when a company can IPO and make billions in just a few years.

The image of the woman holding the model of the sensor is nice because it includes a moon for scale.

Question I was curious about is whether or not the focal plane was flat (it is).

This is an interesting tidbit:

> Once images are taken, they are processed according to three different timescales, prompt (within 60 seconds), daily, and annually.

> The prompt products are alerts, issued within 60 seconds of observation, about objects that have changed brightness or position relative to archived images of that sky position. Transferring, processing, and differencing such large images within 60 seconds (previous methods took hours, on smaller images) is a significant software engineering problem by itself. This stage of processing will be performed at a classified government facility so events that would reveal secret assets can be edited out.

They are estimating 10 million alerts per night, which will be released publicly after the previously mentioned assessment takes place.

[0] https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/?target=12%2026%205...

[1] https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery/collections/first-look-...

Incredible.

For observatories like Rubin, is there a plan for keeping them open after the funding ends? Is it feasible for Chile to take over the project and keep it going?

On a practical note, what happens to a facility like this if one day it's just locked up? Will it degrade without routine maintenance, or will it still be operational in the event someone can put together funding?

* https://petapixel.com/2025/06/23/hands-on-at-the-vera-c-rubi...

Not super technical, but a little higher level (with decent analogies to photography, for their traditional audience).

TL;DR: VCRO is capable of imaging spy- and other classified US satellites. An automated filtering system (involves routing through some government processing facility) is in place to remove them from the freshly captured raw data used for the public transient phenomena alert service. 3 days later, unredacted data is made available (by then the elusive, variable-orbit assets are long gone.)

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44352455, but no comments there)

What's that faint illuminated tendril extending from M61 (the large spiral galaxy at the bottom center of the image) upwards towards that red giant? It seems too straight and off-center to be an extension of the spiral arm.

EDIT: The supposed "Tidal tail" on M61 was evidently known from deep astrophotography, but only rarely detected & commented upon.

I'll see myself out.