Announcements 2024

20 December 2024: Project and Science News Rubin has had a busy and eventful year, and 2024 is drawing to a close. We wish everyone a safe and restful holiday to prepare for next year, and for the approaching finish line of Rubin Construction. We hope you enjoy Rubin’s 2024 holiday card. We hope to see many of you at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) winter meeting (AAS 245) in National Harbor, MD on January 12-16. The Rubin Town Hall is scheduled for Tuesday, January 14th. Rubin will also be presenting a panel for media and science writers during the meeting, please check the AAS schedule for the date and time. And don’t forget to stop by Rubin’s exhibit booth (#105A in the NSF Pavilion)! Rubin leadership and staff joined representatives from NOIRLab, AURA, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science for …

2 December 2024: Star trails streak across the sky above the summit of Maunakea in this image, which shows the surroundings of the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab. The long exposure time of this photograph, coupled with the rotation of Earth, has caused the stars to streak into a multitude of graceful arcs. To the right of the image a much more earthly trail is visible; hikers with head torches have illuminated the final stretch of the Humuʻula Trail which winds up to the summit of Maunakea. One of the streaks of light in the skies above Maunakea didn’t originate from a distant star, but rather from something much closer to home. A passing airplane has left a dashed trail at the lower left of this image, pointing the way to the glowing patch …

2 December 2024: NOIRLab’s system of observatories and exploration tools are unraveling the secrets of the Universe. You can start your own journey to explore the night sky right from your own backyard. There are plenty of celestial events for skywatchers to observe every month. Here are some highlights. Key terms Conjunction A conjunction occurs when two or more astronomical objects appear close together in the sky, which often creates dramatic views. Degrees Degrees are a measure of distance across the sky. With an outstretched arm, one degree is about the width of your pinky finger. 4 December: Moon and Venus conjunction The crescent Moon and bright Venus will be just three degrees apart in the early evening sky. Look southwest from Tucson and Hilo, and west from La Serena. The night sky from Tucson on 4 December about an hour after sunset. Hilo will have a similar view, while La Serena observers …

2 December 2024: Professional Development Opportunities 5 December, Astronomy Modeling with Rubin Observatory Time: 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. MSTLocation: Online Description: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has developed a suite of free classroom-ready investigations (and support materials such as phenomena and assessments) that use authentic data to explore common astronomy topics. These may be integrated into American Modeling Teachers Association (AMTA) Astronomy Modeling units and provide multiple opportunities for deep dives into making sense of data. In this session, you will explore Surveying the Solar System, in which students develop a model of a set of newly discovered Solar System objects by analyzing their orbital properties. Register here. Community Events Hawai‘i 8 December, Makahiki Stargazing Location: Pōkaʻi Bay, Waianae, HITime: 3:00 pm HSTDescription: Gemini/NOIRLab is partnering with ʻOhana Kilo Hōkū and the Royal Order of Kamehameha to offer stargazing during the season of Makahiki at Pōkaʻi Bay. Attendees will enjoy makahiki games, …

2 December 2024: Do you live outside of Arizona, Hawai‘i, and Chile, but still want your students to experience NSF NOIRLab’s world-class telescopes? Now you can bring the centers exploring the wonders of the Universe directly to your classroom or remote teaching environment with NOIRLab’s Virtual Tours. The Experience The comprehensive virtual tours are loaded with interactive elements that give special behind-the-scenes access to the facilities and diverse communities that make astronomy research possible. The entire virtual tour suite consists of eight different locations, featuring panoramic images from various areas near the summit and base facilities of all our Programs, and is supported on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and virtual reality headsets. The virtual tours include NSF NOIRLab Headquarters in Tucson, NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory southwest of Tucson on the Tohono O’odham Nation, Maunakea and the Hilo Base Facilities in Hawai‘i, as well as NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Cerro Pachón and …

2 December 2024: Black holes are some of the most intriguing objects in the Universe and are fascinating to astronomers, the public, and students alike. Recently, International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh led a team that discovered a black hole that is consuming matter much faster than any other black hole ever observed. A black hole is a region of space that contains incredible amounts of matter in a very small volume to the point where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. Although the force of gravity from a black hole is extremely strong, there is a limit on how fast it can pull in material — the Eddington limit. As material falls into a black hole, the material forms a very hot disk called an accretion disk. The hot material in the accretion disk exerts an outward pressure on the infalling material. As more material falls onto …

2 December 2024: You may have heard that NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a survey telescope — but what does that mean? Survey telescopes, like the one at Rubin Observatory, make maps of the night sky by scanning and taking pictures of all regions of the sky instead of one specific object or set of objects. Rubin will take hundreds of images of the southern hemisphere sky, every night for ten years, for a survey called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The survey will yield a treasure trove of discoveries: asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, and supernova explosions. Rubin Observatory has developed some engaging resources to help introduce the concept of a survey telescope, which are available at rubinobservatory.org. One resource is an online game called Space Surveyors, in which users simulate the process of scanning the night sky to collect data. Beware of clouds, satellites, and airplanes that …

27 November 2024: Project and Science News Project reminder: November 28-29 are Thanksgiving US holidays for Rubin with US staff likely unavailable/offline. The Commissioning team continues to share technical updates on the progress of on-sky commissioning activities using the Commissioning Camera (ComCam) on the Rubin Community Forum and the #commissioning-updates Slack channel. Highlights curated for a non-technical audience will also be posted on Rubin’s social media accounts. Rubin staff provided several impactful activities at the recent annual meeting of La Sociedad Chilena de Astronomía (SOCHIAS), held November 11-15 in Arica, Chile’s northernmost city. Education and Public Outreach team members Fernanda Urrutia and Ardis Herrold led a teacher training session on Rubin’s “Coloreando el Universo” investigation, which was attended by a roomful of enthusiastic educators. Holger Drass, Verification Systems Engineer for Rubin, gave a talk about Rubin and supported outreach efforts at the AURA-O exhibit booth. The Chilean scientific community continues to show a …

21 November 2024: For four years the NEID (rhymes with fluid) spectrograph, mounted on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at U.S. National Science Foundation Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a Program of NSF NOIRLab, has been delivering on one of its main science goals — to confirm exoplanet candidates from other exoplanet missions and characterize both newly confirmed and known planets. But NEID is also carrying out a larger program called the NEID Earth Twin Survey (NETS). NETS is aimed at pushing exoplanet detection beyond the limits of pre-NEID instruments with the specific goal of searching around bright, nearby stars for low-mass exoplanets that weren’t detectable before. NEID is now delivering on this goal as the first instrument to confirm and characterize exoplanet HD 86728 b. The team, led by postdoctoral researcher and NOIRLab astronomer Arvind Gupta, presents these results in a paper to appear in AAS Journals. NEID is optimized to observe an …

11 November 2024: Together with the other Maunakea Observatories (MKOs), and a collection of STEM organizations, the International Gemini Observatory, funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, celebrated the annual AstroDay Kona. On Saturday, 2 November 2024, friends and families of all ages were invited to the free event held outdoors at the Kona Commons Shopping Center in Kailua-Kona, Hawai‘i. AstroDay Kona provided an estimated 600 visitors with the opportunity to learn about the Universe and the spectacular discoveries made by Gemini and the other telescopes on Maunakea. Like the Annual AstroDay in Hilo each May, this event is led by the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. To share the wonders of the cosmos that inspire astronomy research, observatory staff presented the community with special science demonstrations, activities and informative exhibitions, including dozens of free images, hands on optics demonstrations, and exoplanet crafts! More information …

6 November 2024: Project and Science News Rubin achieved a historic milestone on October 24th, 2024, when the summit team captured the first on-sky data with Rubin’s Commissioning Camera and transferred it from Chile to the US Data Facility at SLAC. This successful end-to-end engineering test is the product of decades of dedication and innovation by Rubin Project members and the community. Read the details in Rubin’s public announcement on rubinobservatory.org. Additional visuals are available in the Gallery. During the periods of on-sky commissioning using the Commissioning Camera (ComCam) and LSST Camera (LSSTCam), Rubin Observatory plans to share brief technical updates on the progress of on-sky commissioning activities with the Rubin science community on a roughly weekly cadence. These posts will complement existing communications products. Posts will appear on the LSST Community forum in the News category with the commissioning-updates tag and on the LSSTC Slack workspace in the new #commissioning-updates channel. Rubin …

5 November 2024: More than 1300 students and 80 teachers participated in the activities of Viaje al Universo 2024, which took place from 21–25 October in La Serena and Vicuña in Chile. Viaje is one of NSF NOIRLab’s core educational programs, whose main goal is to bring astronomers, scientists, engineers and the staff of our observatories into the local classrooms. This year’s program included 41 activities implemented in 5 schools of La Serena and Vicuña by a group of 26 volunteers. All the activities of Viaje are aligned with the Chilean educational curriculum in order to provide a tangible contribution to the teaching and learning of science, physics and astronomy in Chile. Teachers and students were excited by all of the engaging activities, which included solar telescope observations, dark sky awareness experience, as well as workshops to learn about the Solar System, the life cycle of stars, galaxies, robotics, and much more. These …

2 November 2024: On 15 November Saturn will end its retrograde motion, halting its westward movement through the constellations and returning to its usual eastward motion. This reversal of direction is a phenomenon that all of the Solar System’s outer planets periodically undergo and is caused by Earth’s own motion around the Sun. As Earth orbits the Sun our perspective changes, causing the apparent movement of objects across the celestial sphere to switch directions following regular periods, depending on how fast they orbit the Sun. Saturn enters retrograde motion approximately once each year, typically lasting about 4.5 months. The Leonids meteor shower will be active 6–30 November, producing its peak rate of meteors around 17 November. The majority of meteors will appear to originate from the shower’s radiant point in the constellation Leo. However, shooting stars can be seen across the entirety of the night sky due to the various angles at which …

2 November 2024: Professional Development Opportunities NOIRLab Sessions at the NSTA National Conference Generating classroom lessons from NSF-funded facility resourcesThursday 7 November • 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. CDTNew Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – 294 Exploring the Cosmos with NOIRLab and LLPADFriday 8 November • 1:20 p.m. – 2:20 p.m. CDTNew Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – 281 Hunting For Brown Dwarfs With NSF NOIRLabSaturday 9 November • 10:20 a.m. – 11:20 a.m. CDTNew Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center – 398 15 and 16 November, Capacitaciones de Educación del Observatorio Vera C. Rubin Time: 15 November 5:15 p.m. – 8:15 p.m. CLST and 16 November 9:30 a.m. –12:30 p.m. CLSTLocation: Universidad de Tarapacá, Campus Saucache, Arica, ChileDescription: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, will offer a training session for high school teachers. In this session, we will present the educational activities developed at the observatory, focusing on the investigation "Coloring …

2 November 2024: Join the hunt for exoasteroids by bringing a new citizen science opportunity into your classroom! Exoasteroids is a citizen science project designed to help astronomers discover debris disks and asteroids around white dwarfs. These disks are great environments for studying how planetary systems form and end. This project would fit well into teaching units such as Solar System formation and stellar evolution. Students will analyze data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope to identify changes in the brightness of white dwarfs, providing a glimpse into our own Solar System’s fate! See the full announcement here.

2 November 2024: Project ASTRO is a long-running project at NOIRLab that brings together classroom teachers and astronomers to collaborate on astronomy education in the classroom. The Project ASTRO fall workshop was held at Kitt Peak National Observatory on 12 October 2024. The all-day workshop consisted of hands-on activities, telescope tours, and evening observing. Teachers worked with astronomers to learn how astronomers analyze light, the phases of the Moon, and the science of comets — appropriate as Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS was a pleasing sight after sunset. Participants toured the Nicolas U. Mayall 4-meter telescope and the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope. Workshop attendees also saw a Science On a Sphere show. Teachers left the workshop with a plethora of educational resources and a network of astronomers to visit their classrooms, lead activities, and talk about science careers and other roles agreed on by the teachers and astronomers. Information and applications for the 2025 Project ASTRO workshop …

2 November 2024: In celebration of its fifth anniversary, NSF NOIRLab recently released a dazzling new image of the Rosette Nebula, taken with the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab. Part of what makes the image so striking are the contrasting colors swirling in ethereal layers around the nebula’s center. So it may surprise you to learn that the raw data from the camera hold no information about the light’s colors at all. In fact, all the camera captures is light intensity. “Each pixel in the camera is like a little solar panel,” explains Travis Rector, an astronomer and image processing specialist who leads the production of many NOIRLab images. “The pixel just knows how much light is hitting it, and the more light that hits it the …

2 November 2024: Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is pleased to announce the launch of a variety of field trip programs for K–12 school groups, homeschool groups, and other education groups. This unique experience will give your students an opportunity to see first-hand the cutting-edge science and engineering of a national observatory! All field trips are tailored by grade level and include a visit to the Windows on the Universe Center at the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope. During the field trip, students will learn about the Tohono O’odham Nation, explore the Sun through exhibits and a Science on a Sphere show, and participate in a hands-on astronomy activity. Visit our webpage to find more information about the KPNO field trips and to request a trip for your school. See the full announcement here.

2 November 2024: Stellar Safari is Rubin Observatory’s newest investigation, released in August. Students explore stars in their wild and natural environments to compare and understand their properties, and determine the distances to the star clusters in which they reside. We are collecting feedback from both students and teachers on this investigation. Check it out and let us know what you think!An Educators’ Roundtable was held in October to solicit ideas and discussion about what resources and activities would be helpful for educators introducing Rubin First Look materials to students. This is the first in a series of Zoom meetings for educators to build momentum and engagement. Want to get involved? Email education@lsst.org. Alan Strauss, Head of Rubin EPO delivered the astrophysics plenary at the 2024 Congreso Nacional de Física meeting in Chihuahua, Mexico. His talk was titled Rubin Observatory — Bringing the Sky to Life, which presented a broad overview of the …

28 October 2024: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory passed its first end-to-end engineering test using a low-resolution testing camera known as the Commissioning Camera. The Commissioning Camera will later be replaced with the much higher resolution LSST Camera, the largest digital camera ever built, which Rubin Observatory will use to conduct the most comprehensive data-gathering mission in the history of astronomy — the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Rubin is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. The mood in the observatory control room was electric as Rubin’s first on-sky data were captured by the test camera and transferred successfully from the observatory in Chile to the U.S. Data Facility at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. This moment was the culmination of decades of hard work by the Rubin team. Those present in Chile gathered at the base of the Simonyi Telescope …