The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun generating test images of the night sky, thanks to the Simonyi Survey Telescope and its giant camera as well as a data management team that includes scientists from the University of Washington.
Team members started taking on-sky engineering data with Rubin’s LSST Camera on April 15, according to an update posted to an online forum for the Rubin Observatory research community by Keith Bechtol, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“The Data Management system successfully transported and processed the 3-gigapixel images at the US Data Facility within about a minute of acquisition,” Bechtol wrote. “The distributed Rubin team was jubilant, taking a few moments to celebrate the first few data acquisitions, and then quickly got back to work.”
