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The Vera C Rubin Observatory camera is the size of family car and weighs over 3 tons. | Credit: Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

The world’s biggest camera, capable of delivering 3200 megapixel image of the night sky, is about to show us its first-ever images. The monster camera, which is housed at the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, is said to be able to see a golf ball from 15 miles away. On June 23 the first images from its ultra-definition sensor will be made public for the first time.

This moment has been a long time coming. We started reporting on this monster camera back in 2019, when the giant lens for the camera, which measures 5 metres across, was being assembled at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in California. The camera will capture 1000 images a night over the next 10 years, with the project’s mission being to catalog 20 billion galaxies.

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The First Look event at the observatory next week will unveil “a set of large, ultra-high-definition images and videos that showcase Rubin’s extraordinary capabilities to the world for the first time”, we are told. “This will mark the beginning of a new era in astronomy and astrophysics”.

The event will be shown live on the Vera C Rubin Observatory’s YouTube channel and on its website at 11am (Eastern Daylight Time) / 4pm (British Summer Time) on Monday, June 23, 2025.

Hundreds of venues around the world will also be hosting watch parties that include a public viewing of the live stream. Check out the Rubin First Look Watch Party website to find out if there is a location near you.

The Vera C. Rubin telescope is situated high in the Andes, near Santiago in Chile | Credit: Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA

Some of our earlier stories on the Vera C Rubin telescope’s camera:

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• The car-sized camera that can see a golf ball from 15 miles away is nearly ready to start taking epic images of the galaxy

• World’s biggest camera now ready to shoot 3,200-megapixel photos of outer space

The first images of the cosmos taken by the world’s largest digital camera onboard the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are about to be released to the public. Here’s how to watch the action live

A brand-new, cutting-edge telescope called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to release its first images to the world, and the public can watch in real time.

On June 23 the observatory will unveil a first look at ultrahigh-definition images and videos of the cosmos taken from a mountaintop in Chile. And you can participate by joining a public livestream (in English and Spanish) or one of the in-person watch parties at planetariums, universities and museums around the globe. These watch parties will include a stream of the live unveiling event, as well as three-dimensional virtual tours of the observatory and its surroundings on the peak of Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the Chilean Andes.

Space enthusiasts who can get to a watch party at a planetarium will be rewarded with immersive full-dome images of the horizon-to-horizon Southern Hemisphere night sky. U.S. planetariums throwing watch parties include the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the CCNY Planetarium at the City College of New York, the Fogg Planetarium at the Challenger Learning Center of Tallahassee in Florida, the Eastern Michigan University Planetarium in Ypsilanti, the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder, Colo., and the Ritter Planetarium at the University of Toledo in Ohio, among others. A full list can be found at the Rubin Observatory Watch Party website.

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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory takes a full image of the southern sky every three nights using the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey telescope, whose array of mirrors includes the largest convex mirror ever made. The view from the telescope is photographed with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera, which is the largest digital camera ever made—about the size of a car. The sky images can be stitched together to show changes in the cosmos, such as the movements of comets through the solar system.

During the public events, you’ll also get to watch one of the observatory’s high-resolution time-lapse “movies” of the visible sky. It will be sky watching in high definition: the observatory is designed to show very detailed views of the universe in crisp detail over wide areas, so viewers will get a glimpse of distant galaxies, galaxy clusters and stars. One goal is to map the Milky Way and look for streams of stars that are the remnants of galaxies that were torn apart by their neighbors eons ago. These remnants can help scientists understand how the Milky Way formed. Another goal is to catalog the solar system’s asteroids and comets, as well as farther-flung transient phenomena such as supernovae. Finally astronomers want to use the Rubin Observatory to understand dark matter, which has mass but doesn’t release or reflect light. So while you won’t get a glimpse of this pervasive matter, astronomers can study it through its gravitational effects on visible matter, such as the galaxies and galaxy clusters that the LSST camera will photograph night after night.

Anyone can sign up to host a watch party at the Rubin Observatory website. Hosts will receive access to a virtual 3D model of the observatory and a virtual tour of Cerro Pachón. They’ll also have access to a planetarium-dome-sized feed of the livestream, as well as other planetarium content. Home viewers will be able to see the livestream and images at rubinobservatory.org.

An accident is revealed as the true cause of Gagarin’s crash during a test flight in 1968

The circumstances surrounding the death of the first man in space Yuri Gagarin, who was killed in a 1968 jet crash, have long been clouded in theories and rumors. Now, the first man to walk in space says he can reveal what really happened to his friend and fellow Russian cosmonaut.

Alexei Leonov, who in 1965 became the first man to leave a spacecraft and float in the open vacuum of space, has worked for years to learn what led to Gagarin’s death. He finally gained permission and spoke about the details in an interview released on Friday (June 14) by the state-funded Russia Today (RT) television network.

Yuri Gagarin made history by launching on the world’s first manned spaceflight on April 12, 1961. He died just shy of his Vostok 1 mission’s seventh anniversary, on March 27, 1968, when the MiG-15 fighter jet that he and instructor Vladimir Seryogin were piloting on a routine training flight went down outside a small town near Moscow.

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Leonov, who had been in the vicinity that day and reported hearing two loud booms in the distance, served on the state commission that investigated the crash. The official findings reported Gagarin and Seryogin had maneuvered to avoid colliding with bird or other object, and as a result, entered a tailspin and plummeted to the ground.

“That conclusion is believable to a civilian — [but] not to a professional,” Leonov, now 79, explained to RT. “In fact, everything went down differently.”

Vodka, vent or vertical drop

The official explanation of how Yuri Gagarin died did not go unchallenged, and not by Leonov alone. Many theories, ranging from the technical to the conspiratorial, have been raised in the decades since.

The Soviet government, military and even the KGB looked into some the claims, dismissing rumors that Gagarin had been intoxicated, or that he and Seryogin had been “taking potshots at wild deer from their plane, causing it to spiral out of control,” as Leonov recounted in “Two Sides of the Moon,” the joint-biography he penned with U.S. astronaut David Scott in 2004.

The government’s investigations also ruled out sabotage.

Documents declassified in 2003 revealed that the KGB had suspected air traffic controllers as having contributed inadvertently to the crash by providing bad weather data. Gagarin and Seryogin were led to believe that a bank of clouds were higher than they really were, leaving them too little time to recover from a spin, the intelligence agency suggested.

Yet another theory, put forth by a retired Soviet Air Force colonel, proposed that the pilot who had previously flown the MiG-15 jet had tampered with or otherwise left an air vent open in the cockpit, leading to Gagarin and Seryogin suffering from oxygen deprivation at altitude.

For his part, Leonov held for years that he thought the first loud boom he heard was another jet breaking the sound barrier, followed soon thereafter by the sound of Gagarin’s jet hitting the ground.

Another pilot’s error

“We knew that a Su-15 [fighter jet] was scheduled to be tested that day, but it was supposed to be flying at the altitude of 10,000 meters [33,000 feet] or higher, not 450-500 meters [1,480-1,640 feet],” Leonov told RT. “It was a violation of the flight procedure.”

A new declassified report confirmed that an unauthorized Sukhoi (Su-15) supersonic jet flew dangerously close to Gagarin’s MiG-15.

“While afterburning the aircraft reduced its echelon at a distance of 10-15 meters [30-50 ft] in the clouds, passing close to Gagarin, turning his plane and thus sending it into a tailspin — a deep spiral, to be precise — at a speed of 750 kilometers per hour [470 miles per hour],” Leonov said in the television interview.

Upon seeing the released report, Leonov also realized that his own account of that day had been recorded incorrectly. The report suggested that he heard the loud booms 15 to 20 seconds apart, when it was actually two seconds.

“That suggested that the two jets must have been no less than 50 kilometers apart.” Leonov said.

Armed with the report’s data, a new computer simulation was generated, revealing why Gagarin’s jet went down.

“Now, a jet can sink into a deep spiral if a larger, heavier aircraft passes by too close and flips [the jet] over with its backwash. And that is exactly what happened to Gagarin. That trajectory was the only one that corresponded with all our input parameters,” Leonov told RT.

Leonov was allowed to go public with the story, except for one detail: the Su-15 pilot’s name. That pilot, who is now 80, is said to be in poor health.

“I was asked not to disclose the pilot’s name,” Leonov explained. “He is a good test pilot… It will fix nothing.”

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It may seem round when viewed from space, but our planet is actually a bumpy spheroid

As countless photos from space can attest, Earth is round—the “Blue Marble,” as astronauts have affectionately dubbed it. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Planet Earth is not, in fact, perfectly round.

This is not to say Earth is flat. Well before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Aristotle and other ancient Greek scholars proposed that Earth was round. This was based on a number of observations, such as the fact that departing ships not only appeared smaller as they sailed away but also seemed to sink into the horizon, as one might expect if sailing across a ball says geographer Bill Carstensen of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Isaac Newton first proposed that Earth was not perfectly round. Instead, he suggested it was an oblate spheroid—a sphere that is squashed at its poles and swollen at the equator. He was correct and, because of this bulge, the distance from Earth’s center to sea level is roughly 21 kilometers (13 miles) greater at the equator than at the poles.

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Instead of Earth being like a spinning top made of steel, explains geologist Vic Baker at the University of Arizona in Tucson it has “a bit of plasticity that allows the shape to deform very slightly. The effect would be similar to spinning a bit of Silly Putty, though Earth’s plasticity is much, much less than that of the silicone plastic clay so familiar to children.”

Our globe, however, is not even a perfect oblate spheroid, because mass is distributed unevenly within the planet. The greater a concentration of mass is, the stronger its gravitational pull, “creating bumps around the globe,” says geologist Joe Meert at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Earth’s shape also changes over time due to a menagerie of other dynamic factors. Mass shifts around inside the planet, altering those gravitational anomalies. Mountains and valleys emerge and disappear due to plate tectonics. Occasionally meteors crater the surface. And the gravitational pull of the moon and sun not only cause ocean and atmospheric tides but earth tides as well.

In addition, the changing weight of the oceans and atmosphere can cause deformations of the crust “on the order of a centimeter or so,” notes geophysicist Richard Gross at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “There’s also postglacial rebound, with the crust and mantle that were depressed by the huge ice sheets that sat on the surface during the last ice age now rebounding upward on the order of a centimeter a year.”

Moreover, to even out Earth’s imbalanced distribution of mass and stabilize its spin, “the entire surface of the Earth will rotate and try to redistribute mass along the equator, a process called true polar wander,” Meert says.

To keep track of Earth’s shape, scientists now position thousands of Global Positioning System receivers on the ground that can detect changes in their elevation of a few millimeters, Gross says. Another method, dubbed satellite laser ranging, fires visible-wavelength lasers from a few dozen ground stations at satellites. Any changes detected in their orbits correspond to gravitational anomalies and thus mass distributions inside the planet. Still another technique, very long baseline interferometry, has radio telescopes on the ground listen to extragalactic radio waves to detect changes in the positions of the ground stations. It may not take much technology to understand that Earth is not perfectly round, but it takes quite a bit of effort and equipment to determine its true shape.