On Monday, the cosmic curious are getting a first full look at pictures of the universe that reveal the capabilities of the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
One shows a riotously pink view of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas.
The two sprawling clouds of dust and gas, thousands of light-years away from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, have been photographed often by both amateurs and professional astronomers. More powerful instruments have taken more detailed photos, but with their narrow field of view, they only see a small slice of the scene.
“You’ve not seen the whole thing, all captured at once at this depth with so many objects there,” said Steven Ritz, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the project scientist for Rubin construction. “That, I would point out, is new. And just how pretty it is.”
Dr. Ritz hopes this teaser image will pique people’s curiosity enough to tune in to a news conference on Monday, June 23, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time when observatory officials will reveal what they are calling Rubin’s “First Look” images.
The Rubin Observatory, a joint venture of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, will provide a comprehensive view of the night sky unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
The observatory is in northern Chile, on a mountain in the foothills of the Andes at the edge of the Atacama Desert. The location, high and dry, provides clear skies for observing the cosmos.
It is named after Vera Rubin, an astronomer best known for discovering evidence of dark matter in the cosmos.
A unique design means the telescope can gaze both deep and wide. By scanning the entire sky every three to four days for 10 years, it will discover millions of exploding stars, space rocks flying past and patches of warped space-time that produce distorted, fun-house views of distant galaxies.
This treasure trove of data will allow astronomers to investigate dark energy, a force pushing the universe to expand ever faster, as well as dark matter, a mysterious substance that behaves somewhat like galactic glue. Closer to Earth, it will identify asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth.
The picture of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas is a composite of 650 images taken through four different color filters. It covers an area of the sky equivalent to about 60 full moons.
“These are stellar nurseries,” said Clare Higgs, an outreach specialist working for Rubin. Within the picture are “really young, hot stars that are forming, and as they do, they carve out and shape and structure the gas and dust that’s around them to create these amazing nebulae,” she said.
The blue regions are illuminated by light from young, hot stars and scattered by dust, she said. The pinkish colors most likely come from emissions of excited hydrogen atoms, and the dark tendrils are lanes of dust.
Two other teaser images show snippets of the Virgo Cluster, a group of galaxies some 55 million light-years away. The two images were cut from a much larger picture taken over the course of four nights in early May.
“Every time you zoom in, you find a new interesting detail,” Dr. Higgs said.
In the foreground are bright stars that lie within our Milky Way galaxy. In the background are many extremely distant galaxies, with a reddish hue, because in an expanding universe, distant objects are moving away at high speeds. In the middle are galaxies within the Virgo cluster. The blue dots within galaxies are star-forming regions with younger, hotter stars.
“Goose bumps,” Dr. Ritz said, describing his reaction at seeing the imagery. “It was emotional as well as intellectual,” he said.
After a decade of construction, the completed telescope recorded its first photons — bits of light — on April 15.
The first image was not perfect. Instead of dots of light, stars showed as doughnuts. But seeing doughnuts rather than smeared blurs meant the mirrors were not far out of alignment.
After a few adjustments, the doughnuts turned into dots.
“This period of time between that first image and this very clear image you see right here was less than a few minutes,” Alysha Shugart, deputy manager of the observing specialists team, said during a presentation to reporters at the observatory in May. “And this was our night of first photon.”
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, Dr. Ritz said.
Rubin is far from the largest telescope in the world, but it is a technological marvel. The main structure of the telescope, with a 28-foot-wide primary mirror, an 11-foot-wide secondary mirror and the world’s largest digital camera, floats on a thin layer of oil. Magnetic motors twirl the 300-ton structure around — at full speed, it could complete one full rotation in a little more than half a minute.
That high-speed operation allows Rubin to quickly pan across the sky, taking some 1,000 photos per night.
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
Katrina Miller is a science reporter for The Times based in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
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