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Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

rubinobservatory.org

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Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

#121

Post by padjo »

bjt wrote: post #43
m3kw9 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which also tells the astronomical low odds of asteroids hitting earth even with “so many” of them. To me it changes nothing

If it has the potential to wipe out our entire species, but there's something we could do to prevent it (which I'm not sure about w/r/to asteroids), then it's worth looking out for the black swan event. Doing some extremely rough math along these lines to double check myself: * Gemini says that a dinosaur-extincting asteroid hits Earth about once every 100 million years. So in any given year that's 0.000001%. * Econo…

It seems incredibly bizarre to assign a monetary value to the elimination of all human life given the concept of monetary value would be wiped out along with the people.

Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

#123

Post by KurSix »

dekhn wrote: post #8

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…

It's not just about pretty pictures (though those are great), it's about building massive datasets that let us actually do statistics on the universe

Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

#125

Post by KurSix »

WD-42 wrote: post #29

The amount of data this thing will be putting out every night is insane. For years now the community has been building the infrastructure to be able to efficiently consume it for useful science, but we still have work to do. Anyone interested in the problem of pipelining and distributing 10s of TB of data a night should check out the LSST and related GitHubs.

Yep, the data engineering side of this is just as fascinating as the astronomy

Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

#126

Post by binarystargazer »

I'm the Rubin team member responsible for mapping the data into RGB images. I have been a long time reader of hacker news, but finally made an account to comment on this. I wanted to thank everyone here for their interest and taking their time to check out these images. Seeing everyone interested and engaged makes all the long hours worth it.

Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

#127

Post by KurSix »

0x0203 wrote: post #117
Helmut10001 wrote: post #82

Check out this video: https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery/collections/first-look-... Incredible.

For anyone that hasn't clicked the link, it shows that in just a few days, the observatory has already found over 2000 new asteroids. That is indeed very impressive.

Imagine what it'll be turning up once the full survey is underway

Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

#128

Post by binarystargazer »

sega_sai wrote: post #66
tominspace7 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With an opacity slider, for easy comparison: https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/?baseImageLayer=CDS...

Thanks for the link, I didn't know one can do this with Aladin Lite! But to be fair, if we compare to DESI LS, it looks much less impressive. I.e. all the shells/tidal debris are basically visible in DESI.

I agree their results are also great! We do go a bit deeper, but he big difference it the speed we are able to build these images. We are able to image a larger area of the sky in each exposure, and are able to collect more light. This will lets us build images like this one in a few hours of observation, and build up an equivalent image of the entire southern hemisphere.

Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

#129

Post by phkahler »

binarystargazer wrote: post #126

I'm the Rubin team member responsible for mapping the data into RGB images. I have been a long time reader of hacker news, but finally made an account to comment on this. I wanted to thank everyone here for their interest and taking their time to check out these images. Seeing everyone interested and engaged makes all the long hours worth it.

What range of wavelengths are in the original images? Do you produce multiple RGB images for looking at different things? c'mon, what does that entail? ;-)

Re: Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images

#130

Post by binarystargazer »

ludsan wrote: post #37

something green: https://skyviewer.app/embed?target=186.82033+8.25479&fov=0.0...

Image creator here. This is such a massive dataset, most of the image processing needed to be custom written software pipelines. It not really practical for every pixel to be hand inspected. A few defects (and bright asteroids) imprinted through. It really hard to decide what is a real weird thing in the universe, and what is some sort of instrumental effect. We try to not pre-decide on what we think we should be seeing and filter for those by using things such as using classifiers. That leaves us with heuristics based on temporal information, size (is it smaller than a point spread function), and other related things. On large numbers of objects and pixels 1 in a thousand or 1 in a million outliers are bound to occur.
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