The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, perched 2,700 metres up Cerro Pachón in Chile’s Andes, released its first full-colour images on 23 June. The inaugural set features a mosaic of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae—stellar nurseries thousands of light-years away—and a wide-field view of the Virgo Cluster, together revealing roughly 10 million galaxies. The pictures were taken with the observatory’s 3,200-megapixel LSST Camera, the largest digital imager ever built, mounted on an 8.4-metre, three-mirror telescope. Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, the US$1 billion facility combines a car-sized sensor array with fast optics that capture an area of sky 45 times the size of the full Moon in a single exposure. Commissioning data underscore the system’s reach: a 678-exposure composite assembled in just over seven hours resolved faint gas clouds in the Milky Way, while a separate 10-hour sequence detected 2,104 previously unknown asteroids, including seven near-Earth objects that pose no threat. The camera’s resolution—enough to fill 378 UHD screens per frame—lets astronomers isolate structures that were previously invisible from the ground. Regular operations begin later this year with the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time. The programme will record a 3.2-gigapixel image every 39–40 seconds, generating about 20 terabytes of data nightly and mapping the entire southern sky every three to four nights. Scientists expect the dataset to refine measurements of dark matter and dark energy, chart the Milky Way’s outskirts, and find 90 percent of hazardous asteroids larger than 140 metres—turning the observatory into a discovery engine for the next generation of astronomy.