At Chile’s Vera Rubin Observatory, Earth’s Largest Camera Surveys the Sky | Hacker News Reader

At Chile’s Vera Rubin Observatory, Earth’s Largest Camera Surveys the Sky

nytimes.com

47 pointswglb21 comments

This is funded by the National Science Foundation. 1800 NSF employees are being evicted from their office building by the Housing and Urban Development.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administrat...

Also,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44356890 ("Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images (rubinobservatory.org)" (169 comments))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323389 ("Giant, all-seeing telescope is set to revolutionize astronomy (science.org)" (69 comments))

The title should be corrected to "Earth's", which is the original NYT headline. "Earths" would mean more than one Earth.

Why do they do this? One of the political divisions is not like the others (one of them is also a colloquial name):

"which will be transferred and processed at facilities in California, France and Britain."

Keep it consistent, else I don't know what else you're playing fast and loose with.

France is the odd one out, right? California and Britain having in common that they're each only a part of a country.

Possibly because of the way things are set up (and then the journalist didn't think to clean things up). SLAC (California) is where the US-hosted data will be, but for the UK and France there is more collaboration between HPC/compute centres and so it may end up in different locations (I know for SKA the "UK" "node" is spread across 5 different institutes, so "UK" is a better description than listing 5 different cities).

That sounds plausible. Still, "Britain" isn't the name of any sovereign nation I know of. It'd be like a datacenter in Eemshaven getting attributed to "Holland." It's a bit sloppy. Also California isn't a country.

I'm looking for more sources of information about how the data is scrubbed of NRO satellite data.

Scott Manley mentioned in his recent video that archived data is not scrubbed, but the alerting pipeline is. I would think that artificial satellites were already scrubbed, but I suppose the National Reconnoissance Office and Department of Defense could their own filter.

Archived raw data probably contains everything

The software pipelines are open source and public (I think?), so maybe you could look at the code?

https://archive.ph/2025.06.19-151703/https://www.nytimes.com...

Archive.ph hasn't been working for at least a week or so: it never loads.

Never mind, it's just me. Maybe my ISP blocks the site.

20 TB of data every night, incredible. 15 seconds per image and 2 seconds to download.

Hopefully those hi-res images will help us answer the many questions we have, provided the answer is in the south!

And you can view the widely hi-res images interactively here https://skyviewer.app/!

It's like the universe is getting live-streamed

> 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars…

Are there more visible galaxies than stars? (Discounting of course that those galaxies are comprised of stars.)

It's estimated their similar in number. 100b galaxies in the _visible_ universe and the Milky Way has around 100b stars

We haven’t detected every star in the Milky Way, low mass stars that stars can be very dim.

However we can also detect individual stars in the Andromeda galaxy and several others as well.

The idea of cataloging billions of galaxies and spotting millions of nightly changes feels like a new chapter in skywatching

Fucking Starlink.

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