On June 23, 2025, planetariums around the world, including the historic Prague Planetarium, joined together to unveil the first images captured by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
What is it?
Inside the domed theater of the planetarium, with its state-of-the-art LED display that makes images crisper than those of most other planetariums, audiences gathered beneath projections of the cosmos.
As the unveiling was streamed live from Washington D.C., hundreds of institutions across the globe waited to see the powerful observatory's first images of deep space.
Where is it?
This photo was taken at the Prague Planetarium in Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic.
Why is it amazing?
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile hosts the world's largest digital camera, ensuring its images are some of the clearest ever taken. This camera is key to helping achieve Rubin's mission: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which is a 10-year observational campaign cataloging billions of stars, galaxies, supernovae and other objects in our galaxy as part of the hunt for dark matter.
Given its cutting-edge camera, the images from the Rubin Observatory are larger than other data files — so big, in fact, that they need a "data butler" to help process. However, this larger size allows all the nuance and intricacies of our universe to come through, especially in settings like a planetarium.
Want to learn more?
You can read more about the Vera Rubin Observatory and its mission to hunt for dark matter.
