The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, perched 2,700 metres above sea level in Chile’s Andes, has published its inaugural images, captured with a 3,200-megapixel camera that is the largest ever built for astronomy. Released on 23 June, the pictures include a seven-hour composite of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas and a wide-field panorama of the Virgo Cluster containing roughly 10 million galaxies—both rendered with a level of detail that earlier ground-based surveys could not approach. Even before formal science operations begin, the observatory’s commissioning data underscore its power. In ten hours of trial observations the system logged 2,104 previously unrecorded asteroids, seven of them classified as near-Earth objects, illustrating the facility’s potential for planetary-defence work and time-domain astronomy. Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy and equipped with an 8.4-metre three-mirror telescope, Rubin will start its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time later this year. The observatory is designed to take about 1,000 exposures a night—roughly 20 terabytes of data—allowing it to scan the entire southern sky every three to four nights, generate up to ten million real-time alerts on changing celestial events nightly and build an archive expected to catalogue about 20 billion galaxies. Beyond tracking transient phenomena, scientists will use the trove to probe dark matter, refine measurements of dark energy and search for elusive objects such as distant trans-Neptunian worlds. The US$800 million facility, named for the astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter in galaxies, is expected to reshape observational cosmology and remain a cornerstone of global astronomy for the next decade.