The largest spot-the-difference effort EVER has begun!🚨 On the night of Feb 24, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially released its first ~800,000 public alerts of detected changes in the night sky!🔍 A new era of discovery is here✨ 🔭🧪☄️ 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/first-a...

I wonder if people are paying attention to how much their doom scrolling is cutting into time they used to use to read books

Y'ALL I GAVE THE COOLEST TALK OF MY LIFE TODAY. Rubin's super detailed, hi res images on a state of the art LED planetarium? YES PLEASE. I didn't want to leave. Seriously could have just basked under that dome all night. 🔭

For comparison, every robotic mission NASA has ever sent in its history, from the dawn of the Space Age 65 years ago to today, from Mercury to Pluto and beyond, has cost less than $40B. I know which one has done more for humankind and which one should be dismantled.

Making waves in the cosmos, galaxy style 😎🌊 Shell galaxies preserve the memory of a cosmic splash, like ripples in a pond 🌌✨ These elliptical galaxies are surrounded by faint, layered arcs that form when a large galaxy absorbs a smaller one. 🔭 🧪

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

Happy birthday, Vera Rubin! 🥳✨ What better way to celebrate than with NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's view of galaxies SHE studied? NGC 4343, 4526, 4535, and 4378 are just a few gems from our Cosmic Treasure Chest. Explore them and more at skyviewer.app 🔭🧪

Me: ok brain, we gotta do this application due tonight that we've barely started. ADHD brain: no worries, I got this. 3 hours, no problem. Me: we're behind, better double check the requirements. *Deadline extended by three days* ADHD brain: niiiiice, got two more days to relax 😎 Me: 😑😑😑

Hi, it's me, a solar system scientist turned science communicator asking journalists for the thousandth time to stop giving a certain Harvard professor airtime about objects from outside our solar system. I know you know the one.

I could play with the Rubin Skyviewer for hours. Off in one corner of the first image released is this rather lovely little galaxy car crash, which are always my favourites. 🔭 skyviewer.app/explorer

I just had a look around ... and .... look at them twinsies. LOOK AT THEM 😍 #RubinFirstLook #CaptureTheCosmos 🔭🧪

Holyyyyyy....I am a tired exhausted puddle on the floor. What a day for @vrubinobs.bsky.social! This observatory is incredible. Highly, HIGHLY recommend joyscolling around Rubin's Skyviewer. I quite like this galaxy - which is your favorite? 🔭🧪 skyviewer.app

Officially tackling full reveal day with 4 hours of sleep, which is more than I expected to be honest. JOIN US AT 11AM EDT!!!!

I cannot express to you the hours, days, YEARS that went into these images across Rubin. They are spectacular. And truly just a peek. It has been the wildest few months of my life getting my small piece, the social media, ready for this. You're not ready for 11am. ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream

My first story for National Geographic is out, and it's about the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will spend the next decade scanning the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere, revealing all kinds of cosmic wonders: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

We're getting SO CLOSE to the reveal of NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's first images on June 23! So let's take a walk down memory lane 🎞️ Come with us through 10 memorable moments from the past 10+ years of building Rubin 🔭 🧵 📷: H. Stockebrand

I never, ever want to hear again that women are too emotional to be leaders.

Elon threatening to just leave people on the ISS is making a pretty good case for why you nationalize your space program!

You're gonna need a bigger data management system... 🚤🦈 In 10 years, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory data processing will generate around 500 petabytes. Managing all of this data is an international job. 🔭🧪 📷: RubinObs/NSF/DOE/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/W. O'Mullane 🧵

Bend it like gravity! ⚽️ Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for mapping the invisible "dark" Universe. With NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's 10-year survey, scientists will have their best dataset yet for studying the nature of dark matter. 🔭🧪 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-g...

So glad this country's being run by toddlers. This is super fun.

The sky doesn’t wait—and neither will we!💨 NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory has an automated scheduler that takes into account current weather conditions, moon phases, and observatory capabilities to determine the best next place to point the telescope. 🌙 #CaptureTheCosmos 🔭🧪 📷: P. Assunção Lago (Rubin)

No money was actually saved, but at the same time we had truly devastating cuts to scientific research, medicine, and foreign aid. Just reinforces what a tiny fraction of spending those areas always were, with an outsized positive impact.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

Why does LIGO need two detectors anyway? Here’s why. 1/n 🧵⚛️

Inspired by @jtuttlekeane.bsky.social and @ohdearz.bsky.social, here's what the White House proposed budget cuts to NASA would do to the entirety of the agency's Science Mission Directorate. Bloodbath is right.

Trump administration cuts to NSF will result in more than 200,000 FEWER people per year involved in basic science, training, and education - what should have been the next generation of US scientists. This isn't even eating your seed corn, it is setting your seed corn on fire and salting the earth.

Rubin #CommissioningNotes ✍️: The data deluge from NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory is coming! Rubin captured over 500 exposures per night across 3 nights this week, using its automated observation scheduler — that’s 20x more than during the 7 week period with the engineering camera last year!🔭 🧪 🧵

You get a star, everyone gets a star! NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory will collect precise data about 17 billion stars in our galaxy and nearby. That's more than twice the number of people on Earth! With such a detailed map, scientists will better understand our home galaxy's history. 🔭 🧪

This is horrific

Now that the world's largest digital camera is installed, what work remains before Rubin goes live? For starters, hooking up and testing all the camera's connections to the telescope, before cooling it down to -100 C (-148 F) 🥶 Read all the details at rubinobservatory.org/news/prepari...! 🔭🧪

Lights, camera, action! The world's largest digital camera has been installed at NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory! 🤩 The LSST Camera was the final major component of the observatory. With it in place, Rubin officially enters its final phase of testing!🔭 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/lsst-camera-installed

Scrub a dub 🫧 ...except no scrubbing the delicate observatory optics! We don't use cloths or lens cleaner to clean the giant camera lenses. Instead, our summit staff use a high-speed stream of carbon dioxide "snow" to push debris off of the glass surface. 🔭🧪

When you turn it on and it works spectacularly! The Rubin team has successfully completed the first on-sky engineering tests using the 144-Mpx engineering camera. Up next: installing the largest digital camera in the world, LSST Camera! 🔭🧪 rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-completes-comcam-tests

Welcome to Rubin's #CommissioningNotes! Entry 1️⃣: we're in full swing! Ok, but what's "commissioning?" Rubin Observatory is the result of millions of hours of work by thousands of people around the world -- and now all that work is coming together! 🔭🧪 https://youtu.be/-xbzfu75Nzc

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The first step to building anything is designing it! But how did a two-in-one mirror enter the designs for Rubin Observatory in the first place? 🤔 #CaptureTheCosmos youtu.be/5N6Z9t_j-Ps

Excellent advice from @philplait.bsky.social for a total solar eclipse: don't worry about your camera or phone, just experience it, and your experience is your own 🧪🔭 www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-so...

☀️ Happy eclipse day! 🌑 Please, *please* make sure you use eclipse glasses when looking at the Sun. The ONLY time it is safe to take them off is when the Sun is 100% covered. Not even 99% is safe! P.S.: the AAS has a great website with links to maps, glasses guides, and more: eclipse.aas.org 🔭

To close out #WomensHERstoryMonth, we're celebrating our namesake, Dr. Vera C. Rubin ✨ Dr. Rubin was an accomplished American astronomer whose work provided convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter. Rubin Observatory was renamed in her honor in 2019. 🔭

www.savechandra.org is now live

The Cosmic Mysteries Department....coming to a night sky near you* in 2025 ✨ Rubin Observatory is a new astronomical facility nearing completion in Chile. Over ten years, it will use a 3200-megapixel, car-sized digital camera to repeatedly image the sky every few nights🌌 *in Chile

Band nerd, National Honors Society, AND obscure sport baaaaayyybeeeee

I feel this so deeply as someone who spent the first half of this week in 1 and 3, and the second half in 2

How will Rubin help inform future spacecraft missions without leaving the ground? Here's what Rubin scientist Siegfried Eggl had to say! youtu.be/uitWbbpLkgU Want the full story? Read our newest release at rubinobservatory.org...

tbh this place has a really twitter-but-better vibe, really hope that sticks around 🤞 Also, hi friends, been a while since I've been compelled to do anything but lurk on these apps 👋

This is such a fantastically composed and historically meaningful final photo of Ingenuity, taken by Perseverence before it drove away, that I want to make it my phone background but also I don't want to cry every time I look at my phone screen. 🥺

Rubin Observatory’s future asteroid discoveries 🤝 exploratory space missions ➡️ a match made in the cosmos! Rubin will revolutionize asteroid exploration from Earth, uncovering millions of new objects to consider for visits—without ever leaving the ground! 🔗: rubinobservatory.org...