On Monday earlier this week (June 23, 2025) I was lucky to be a specially invited guest to a “reveal party” by Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) as they unveiled their very first images from an amazing telescope. This telescope, ten years in the making, just deployed at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, high in the mountains of Chile and is set to map the Southern Hemisphere sky in exquisite detail.

Stanford Provost, Jenny Matinez, welcoming us to the Party

Its 1.7m-long, 3,200-megapixel camera—the biggest digital camera ever built—has an enormous field of view, equivalent to an area of sky covered by 45 full Moons. Yet, even though it covers such a large swath of the sky, it has pinpoint resolution. Each picture is capable of being zoomed in by 400 times and still remain as sharp as an HDTV! The telescope is highly maneuverable and its images will cover the entire Southern Sky every 3 days. Over 10 years it will cover the sky many times and will provide a moving composite of many changing or fleeting objects such as Asteroids or exploding Novas.

We were shown images from this camera taken that very morning and the team at KIPAC was still gasping at the stunning pictures. Already the camera had revealed over 2000 new objects in the sky previously not seen. Risa Wechsler, the Director of KPAC, and virtually all her faculty and researchers were there and told us how they expect this telescope to impact the future of Physics and Cosmology.

Risa Wechsler, Director of KIPAC, hosted the party and gave us some personal insights. In the background were researchers from the Chile Observatory live to  answer our questions.

The telescope will be able to take an image every 30 seconds and it will use machine-learning algorithms to automatically locate the best places to point the camera every night. Over the course of a decade, each point in the sky will be photographed around 800 times.

Below is a video image showing the Zoom capabilities.

Each image can be zoomed like a huge telephoto lens and can capture billions of objects (some almost as old as our universe itself and not seen in this detail ever before).

It was a great celebration highlighting our relentless human quest to understand the Universe and our place in it. Do these galaxies have any idea that some sentient beings on a remote planet are actually peering at them, marveling at them and charting their evolution?

To paraphrase Prospero from Shakespeare’s Tempest: This is the stuff that dreams are made of!