Nice as the images are (and you can see them all at the Gallery at http://rubinobservatory.org ), they are only a hint of the promise of this project. The big deal is that the telescope can cover the entire sky above Chile in only 3-4 days, so that in a year it can take about 100 full sky views. Astronomers will then stitch them together into a MOVIE of how the sky changes with time.

That’s what we have never had before. It’s like the difference of taking mere snapshots of your relatives, or a movie that shows how they act at a reunion, who they talk to, who they avoid, how drunk they are, etc. In the astronomical movie, we will discover new asteroids as they move around the Sun, identify exploding stars as they blow themselves up, monitor stars that don’t shine steadily, look for giant black holes having a violent snack, and so much more.

The Rubin Observatory is named after Vera Rubin, the American astronomer who first established the existence of dark matter in the universe — we are still trying to find out how this unseen matter (which we know of from its gravitational pull) is distributed and what it’s made of.  Dr. Rubin, whom I got to know when she served on the Board of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific was a great supporter of astronomy education and an effective and outspoken proponent of drawing in more women to science.  The second picture shows us at a Society event in 1992.

The Observatory leaders said they will be ready to take the first official frames of their movie in about 3-4 months. Stay tuned.