The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released a new deep-field image of the COSMOS Field, captured by the world's largest digital camera, revealing more than half a million galaxies and over 50,000 stars in a single composite view of a deliberately chosen "clear window" into deep space.
The deep-field image was captured using Rubin Observatory's 3.2-gigapixel LSST Camera, mounted on the 8.4-metre Simonyi Survey Telescope. It was created by combining hundreds of individual observations into a single composite image of the COSMOS Field, a region selected for its exceptionally clear view of the distant universe.
Captured with the 3.2-gigapixel LSST Camera mounted on the Simonyi Survey Telescope.
Created by stacking hundreds of observations into one composite image.
The COSMOS Field was chosen because it lies away from the Milky Way's dense galactic plane, offering a clearer view of distant galaxies.
The image also reveals faint galactic cirrus, wisps of interstellar dust from the Milky Way, superimposed on the deep-space background.
About The camera
The LSST Camera is the largest digital camera ever built, roughly the size of a small car and weighing around 2,800 kilograms. It sits at the heart of Rubin Observatory, perched atop Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes at over 2,600 metres, a site chosen for its dry air and dark, low-light-pollution skies, ideal conditions for the kind of faint, distant light this instrument is built to capture.
Part of a much bigger mission
This COSMOS Field release follows the observatory's first public images last June, which showed roughly 10 million galaxies in the Virgo Cluster — a debut that itself represented only about 0.05% of Rubin's eventual target. Over its planned 10-year survey, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, Rubin is expected to catalogue around 20 billion galaxies, 17 billion Milky Way stars, and millions of Solar System objects, including thousands of near-Earth asteroids.
Deputy Rubin Construction director Aaron Roodman described the project's purpose plainly at its unveiling: "Building the world's largest digital camera will allow scientists to explore the cosmos in new ways and at a scale that will enable discoveries that should fundamentally change our understanding of the universe."
The Rubin Observatory is expected to generate millions of alerts each night for newly detected asteroids, supernovae and other transient cosmic events. Its primary mission is to study dark matter and dark energy, with the newly released COSMOS Field image offering an early glimpse of the vast dataset the observatory will build over the next decade.