I really like the Rubin because I think a lot of people focus too much on "deep" seeing (IE, looking at individual or several objects with very high magnification only once). The Rubin does much more "wide" seeing and this actually produces a ton of useful data- basically, enough data to collect reliable statistics about things. This helps refine cosmological models in ways that smaller individual observations cannot.
What's amazing to me is just how long it took to get to first photo- I was working on the design of the LSST scope well over 10 years ago, and the project had been underway for some time before that. It's hard to keep attention on projects for that long when a company can IPO and make billions in just a few years.
My feeling is the "deep" vs "wide" thing is a circumstance of which groups you interact with (and also which facilities you have access to, and even to some extent the culture of your science community). Rubin is an example of what you can do when you build something massive specifically for a single purpose, and as more of these kind of facilities come online (SDSS and Gaia have been around for a while, but DESI, 4MOST and other similar facilities are coming, and let's not forget radio), it's what we get out of the whole suite supporting each other that gets the best science.
The "wide" mode is called "survey" astronomy, and there have been several large surveys like Rubin/LSST, going all the way back to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which started in 2000 (if you count surveys from before the era of digital sensors, there are surveys going back more than 100 years).[0] Rubin/LSST is just the newest and most advanced large, ground-based optical survey.
Both modes of observation - surveys and targeted observations of individual objects - are necessary for astronomical research. Often, large surveys are used to scan the sky, and then targeted observations are used to follow up on the most interesting objects.
You worked on the design? That is interesting. I worked on the simulating the LSST , back in 2008 to 2010. The goal of which was to test the data reduction software. We were on the Image Simulation team.
It is surreal to see LSST/Rubin finally get first light.
Even more interesting to see who is still working on LSST, and who is not.
We also simulated the LSST- in this case, using Exacycle at google (an idle cycle harvester). We took a star catalog and passed it through a highly accurate ray tracer that simulated the light falling on the sensors (through space, atmosphere, etc). Apparently it found some bug in the design that was fixed before some expensive part was built (my coworkers were the subject matter expert, I mainly built the exacycle software and sat in on the meetings).
Wow! We also had some ray tracing software, and at one point, my job was to deliver the star (and galaxy) catalogs to the Google office in Seattle. If you worked with the Image Simulation team at U. of Washington in Seattle, then our paths almost crossed, and we might've been on conference calls together.
Deep is still interesting in understanding the origins of the universe. Rubin seems highly practical on the flip side. It'll be a super helpful tool in predicting asteroid impacts.
Also new planets! Planet Nine should likely be resolved within months, one way or another.
> "Probably within the first year we’re going to see if there’s something there or not,” says Pedro Bernardinelli, an astronomer at the University of Washington."
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What's amazing to me is just how long it took to get to first photo- I was working on the design of the LSST scope well over 10 years ago, and the project had been underway for some time before that. It's hard to keep attention on projects for that long when a company can IPO and make billions in just a few years.