The long-awaited Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first batch of images Monday (June 23), captivating the world with one of the most detailed snapshots of space ever taken.
Using the world’s largest digital camera, the Rubin Observatory will spend the next 10 years taking a time-lapse movie of the entire night sky. And for the telescope’s glorious debut, the team revealed a stunning image that captures more than 10 million galaxies in and around the Virgo Cluster — a glittering galaxy cluster located about 55 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Virgo.
The complete 3,200-megapixel image is so vast and detailed, it’s beyond the comprehension of human eyes, project scientists said at a news conference Monday. Luckily, the Rubin Observatory team has made a zoomable, searchable version of the image available on their website — and it’s teeming with jaw-dropping close-ups of cosmic objects, each one a work of art in its own right.
To dip your toes into the overwhelming image, try taking the observatory’s free online tour of “Rubin’s cosmic treasure chest.” We did — and highlighted some of the most stunning sights below, with their coordinates included for easy viewing. See if you can spot these cosmic jewels sprinkled throughout Rubin’s groundbreaking debut image.
A “grand design” spiral galaxy
Coordinates: 185.5, 4.5
Like an enormous celestial mirror, the “grand design” spiral galaxy Messier 61 (M61) gives astronomers a hint of what our own Milky Way looks like from the outside. Arranged face-on — meaning we can see the broad “face” of the galaxy, rather than just its flat edges — M61 flexes strong, well-defined spiral arms and boasts a bright galactic core housing a supermassive black hole. Though it’s located an estimated 55 million light-years from Earth, astronomers have studied the shimmering galaxy for hundreds of years; it was first detected in 1779, according to NASA, and is visible today through a good backyard telescope. You can spot it in the bottom center of Rubin’s image of the Virgo Cluster, just below a smaller, bluer spiral galaxy.
A triple-galaxy collision
Coordinates: 186.67, 9.0
Three spiral galaxies have gotten a little too close for comfort in the upper-right corner of Rubin’s new image. While some individual spiral…
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