Greetings and welcome to this thread I hope to be devoted to the value of Scientific Discovery as well as the (finally !) inclusion of women as well as men, races, nationalities on a global scale of cooperation and collaboration to improve all of our lives.

If you don't know who Vera Rubin was (and Oh! how I wish she had survived ust a few more years to see her legacy begin to bear fruit!) please do look her up. She persevered through crushing odds and made vastly important contributions to our understanding of the world we live in, and especially some of the very first collections of data that began questioning the natures of Expansion and Gravity that led to the concepts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

The Vera Rubin telescope was constructed to honor and expand on her discoveries and today the very first amazing images have been released.

I have a tendency to gush in walls of text that I am attempting to rein in so I will just add one comment in a single example of "frosting on the cake"

The Versa Rubin telescope is a global effort designed primarily for very distant but very fast massive resolutions to study Dark Matter and Dark Energy ! BUT !
because of it's revolutionary camera of 3200 MEGAPIXELS and incredible speed and agility, not to mention breakthrough software (I'm hoping Linux is involved) it can detect events within our Solar System never seen before.

Example: Over the last 200 years around 1 million asteroids have been discovered and catalogued. In a few days Vera Rubin Telescope QUINTUPLED that number! We are talking about 1 million versus 6 million in just a few days discovered because the speed and resolution of this amazing telescope can literally make motion pictures of huge portions of our skies and only closer objects move fast enough by perspective to appear as streaks.

Now these "streaks" can be closely watched for any possibility of coming anywhere near our planet. This is extremely important since even mountain sized asteroids can wipe out entire civilizations yet we hadn't been able to detect such "little rascals" until now, and this is just a free bonus , just a first of what will most certainly be many surprises and benefits.

Some good images here

...and here: https://rubinobservatory.org/news/ru...treasure-chest

OK my mind is officially blown and I mean that because especially in these preliminary stages whether misreported or misunderstood by me there will be some number corrections forthcoming. For example the total number of new asteroids discovered has been extrapolated. In a few hours the telescope added a little more than 2000 previously unseen asteroids. The animation of millions forming a fuzzy ring between Mars and Jupiter is based on what was found in a small segment snapshot video. It will take a year to actually move around to get the actual entire scope.

I can't confirm yet that the amazing software is Linux but it is Open Source and mostly written in some version of C and Python. The team projects many petabytes of data per year. Ultimately super computers with hundreds of thousands of processing cores will be required to handle it all.

The sheer scope of the impact of the Vera Rubin telescope is going to generate many thousands of papers and ridiculously beyond the scope of what can be processed here in a mere message board but so far one of the best podcasts I've seen is by Brian Keating interviewing on of the head scientists on the team, Mario Juric. The scope is vastly greater than even I had hoped for. Not only will it's impact likely exceed even JWST but they, and several other projects will complement each other.

Despite reduced funding we are nevertheless truly in a Golden Age of Astronomy.

Apparently, the proliferation of satellites is starting to interfere with astronomers. Harry Shearer discussed this in this week's episode of his radio show/podcast, with a specifit reference to the Rubin Observatory.

The relevant portion starts at about the 52-minute mark.

It's approaching Off Topic but I suppose I should address the issue of satellite proliferation and it's effect on Astronomy. As an aside I need to note that care is needed where non-scientists (like Harry Shearer) pontificate as if they know Science. This is especially important these days of Science Denial and "fake news". That there are actual humans in the 21st Century apparently honestly believing in Young Earth, Flat Earth, or Both is astounding and actually depressing, disgusting and deeply disturbing to me.

In the case of the thousands of satellites in orbit very few people can grasp the scale of this environment, let alone the capabilities of modern software. This is partly the fault of false perspective. People all over the world and especially those in smaller countries look at a map of the US and have no clue that if they started in New York City and drove night and day, continuously at 60 mph (97 kph) it would take more than two (2) full days and nights IF you never once slowed down to get to Los Angeles.

Similarly few grasp that if our planet earth was the size of a common home globe (16 inches or 41 cm) our atmosphere would be represented by the thickness of a common coin, yet our Moon on that scale would need to be placed almost 40 feet or 12 meters away. If one could taker a passenger jet in space it would take roughly 600 years to get to Neptune. If you had a machine gun that had unlimited ammo and the power to shoot bullets into space you'd shoot a very long time and be extremely lucky to ever hit anything. In fact even if you aimed at something you'd need either supercomputer power or extreme luck to hit anything.

The point is, Space is BIG!...and satellites by comparison are very small....AND if you've seen the iPhone advertisement for its photo editing software a teenage boy with one click removes his Mother from a photo. A longtime friend of mine works at Goddard Space Flight Center and one of his main jobs is chasing down ground loops in circuit board and interconnection architecture to dump noise as much as possible. A great deal of modern scientific measurement and exploration is filtering out the unwanted noise.

Back to scale and false perspective for a moment, a common representation of satellite proliferation shows some depiction of Earth with a fuzzy cloud of satellites in a surrounding halo. This is completely fals much like the "forest for the trees" syndrome. Literally no perspective showing the whole planet can possibly resolve objects the size of even the International Space Station let alone car sized satellites and most are 1/6th that size. No perspective showing a car sized satellite in full. even as a handful of pixels can display the whole Earth.

Example: if you see a depiction of our Earth full size on a huge 120 inch HD monitor, so lets assume the depiction of the Earth is a circle roughly 5 feet in diameter, that would at that scale display the 3000 mile wide US as around 1.7 feet in width. Do you really imagine you could even see average city details at that scale? let alone school busses or cars? That fuzzy halo doesn't exist.

TLDR - I seriously doubt the Vera Rubin telescope will be bothered much if at all even if the number of satellites doubled or tripled tomorrow. Ground based telescopes MUST by nature include lasers and software to compensate for random atmospheric variations. One of the more beneficial and super powerful attributes of the Vera Rubin 3 Trillion pixel camera is how quickly it gathers light. The time lapse of days that created the Hubble Deep Field view can be had by Vera Rubin in mere minutes.

I've seen actual astronomers express concerns over this issue in the past.

A quick search provides plenty of [apparently] scientific publications discussing the issue, here's a handful:

Sep 2020 //www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexs-dark-satellites-are-still-too-bright-for-astronomers/
Oct 2022 //earthsky.org/space/how-satellites-harm-astronomy-whats-being-done/
Mar 2023 //www.sciencenews.org/article/satellites-spacex-problem-space-pollution
Mar 2025 //www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00792-y
May 2025 //phys.org/news/2025-05-satellite-megaconstellations-threaten-radio-astronomy.html

The Nature article is titled "Swarms of satellites are harming astronomy. Here’s how researchers are fighting back" and specifically references the Vera C Rubin Observatory, and has images showing the problem, (but needs an account to read the full article).

I think most of the alarm is being caused by Musk's Starlink satellites. There seem to be an awful lot of them.

I think there are actually some problems for some hardware which is always the case when major advances are made. It's the price of Progress, but I for one am glad automobiles were not hogtied because they scared the horses. OK that may be a bit harsh in this case since the greatest impact will likely be felt by amateur astronomers who are actually still quite important to the field. Nevertheless just as what happens with PCs, adoption reduces costs.

The first hard drives weighed a ton and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and could store around 20 MB. Within a little more than a decade 100 times that storage could be had for a few hundred. Twenty years ago I visited a small community college event sponsored by its Astronomy Club for a close Mars viewing. The weather wasn't anywhere near ideal but about 300 people showed up and at least 100 amateur telescopes. Nearly a dozen of those scopes had digitally automated positioning servo motors installed.

The software created for Vera Rubin Telescope is Open Source. You can bet it will not take long at all before even most amateurs have correction software running. I've experienced some jaw-dropping views over about 50 years through old school eyepieces but once I saw what CCDs could produce and manipulate on even just a little laptop screen it....eyepieces and direct viewing, was all over for me.

I'm not doubting that some difficulties will occur for some people but the simple fact is satellites are not going away anytime soon. They are far too important to modern civilization. So, we will workaround and we will advance, just as we always do.

I am an amateur astronomer, but worked much of my professional career in engineering and technical support of many of the world's radio telescopes (I attended the birth of the VLA, among others).

I enjoyed astro-photography for years before CCDs replaced film and even in the eary '90s I was often annoyed by one or more satellite traces marring a carefully executed exposure.

It isn't the size of the satellites vs the scale of the earth and atmosphere that is the problem. It is their brightness and apparent size vs the brightness and apparent size of things being observed, as seen from the surface of the earth, and the amount of that surface from which they are visible in the course of an evening.

And yes, Starlink is like a finger in the eye in more ways than one, IMO.

Afterthoughts:
I should also note|admit|confess that much of my career was also spent in support of satellite based systems, mostly the ground components but some flight hardware as well. So not really claiming any moral high ground here!

Does anyone remember the Iridium satellites operated originally by Motorola? Their solar panel (or antenna) geometry resulted in a focused beam of light on the earth's surface known as Iridium flares. They were intense. The orientation of those early satellites was changed to prevent those flares, and newer hardware has been designed to eliminate the problem. I had no direct connection to them but have heard from others that this was done specifically in an effort to address complaints from astronomers, amateur and professional.

Satellites are indeed here to stay, but a little consideration for those on the ground can go a long way!

And by the way, thanks for starting this thread!

You're welcome, astrogeek! Thanks for contributing both in the field and here.

While most folks are unaware of the recent advances made in analog computing, it isn't like analog is going to replace digital. I live in a mountainous area where there are still quite a few very decent viewing nights per year and unfortunately the only digital-ization I've invested in my viewing is a USB eyepiece that displays on my laptop. At my age I won't likely take the financial risk of truly "going digital" but if I was still of college age I certainly would, even if just for atmospheric disturbance correction.

I'm fairly confidant that since Vera Rubin Telescope software is designed to handle petabytes of data AND take total sky views and cataloguing every 3 days, effectively a moving picture of everything, noting what is expected to amount to over one million changing events every 3 days, it shouldn't be a monumental task to adapt the rejection algorithms to dismiss satellite data on-the-fly, but certainly in post.

I think it will soon make this satellite issue all but moot.

Dark matter and dark energy?
Sounds like that Sabine Hossenfelder quantum chick. Or string theory, or Einsteins version of relativity.

Very doubtful of anything of that kind and am expecting it to be actual scientific dead ends that have to be worked around later after it's all been shown that it wasn't really all that, but the pictures look nice.

I am extremely ignorant about all and any of those theories, and I generally am interested in those kind of things. No real learned basis, though. Just a 'gut feeling'.
So I can't really refute any of it other than "I just know there's gonna be dead ends cause the first forays into it were rushed to congratulate and decorate the pioneers but it turned out to be almost right but mostly wrong."

Know what I mean?
Like, all those theories get jumped on too hard too quickly, meanwhile people still have trouble with germ theory. Again, I'm not an academic. ...thankfully.

Both have been a privilege, and my own good fortune!

Technology will surely moot the problem for Vera Rubin, but not for the [mb]illions of other eyes who look into the sky at night.

I suspect the slow passing of the last generation to know a truly dark, clear night sky will moot it for the rest.

Hello clueless_dolt and kudos on your interest and willingness to respond. I'd prefer to keep my response narrowly confined to the progression on the concepts of Dark Energy and Dark Matter since the overall topic of any rushing to judgment to avoid taking on a too large, too diffuse area of inquiry.

In the case of Dark Matter and Dark Energy concepts you certainly are not alone in your gut reaction assessment since it is quite a reeling blow to human psyches that we might only be able to "see" roughly 10% of what exists in even our Observable Universe. Before I delve into the speed or slowness of the development of the concept, I think we should take note that human perception only began any manner of expansion with simple optical lenses resulting in telescopes and microscopes roughly 300 years ago, and even that was subjected to extreme doubt for nearly that long. If we consider that there is not an insignificant number of remaining doubters even now in the 21st Century in Young and Flat Earthers, the doubt has yet to completely disappear even in the optical range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Add to that Radio and Infrared Telescopes and Tunneling Microscopes and we have gotten "further into the weeds" away from direct human senses didn't begin until almost 1940 a mere 85 years ago, a little more than a single human generation in time.

To propose that even including that fantastic extension to human senses STILL is only 10% of the real picture is one helluva blow. That it was such a blow included those in the specific scientific communities. The acceptance was far from rapid. In fact, it was a very important reason that Vera Rubin chose to look into what was mainly begun with just some barely more than "Hmmmm..that's odd" from Fritz Zwicke. I don't mean to minimize the importance of Zwicke's contribution (among many!) circa 1933 but it was 1933 and going much deeper was limited by technology as well as the general scientific interest at the time. It was exactly for this reason that Vera Rubin chose to follow up in this area that had almost no competition which was exceptionally important then because prior to the 1970s (Vera won her PhD in 1954) women were....let's say "not taken seriously in the Sciences" to be more gentle that attitudes deserved.

This meant that her deep studies into the rotational velocities of galaxies were FAR more heavily scrutinized than if she instead was male. It turns out that this had considerable benefit as well as cost, though generally in the field not in Ms. Rubin's career. The benefit as many piled on to discredit her research, thinking it an easy path to winning fame and reputation. Instead the quality of her scientific discipline and error detection slowly became reinforced to reach the acclaim she richly deserves.

Please remember that this sort of scrutiny and disdain was not limited to a gender issue back in the 60s and 70s. Even Carl Sagan was subjected to wide prejudice by what should have been his peers just because he thought it important to not stay safe in "Ivory Towers" and attempt to educate "The Average Joe General Public".

My apology for slipping into my long-winded tendencies but this area of proper skepticism and falsifiability as cornerstones of all Science justifying or morphing into actual prejudice is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. On the flip, I'm very glad that the perception of amateur astronomers' work finally progressed into some recognition that even amateurs could do Real Science.

The reason those terms are Dark Matter and Dark Energy is precisely because they are so largely unidentified....so far. At one time in Human History the very Air we breathe was thought to be a Spirit because we could feel it but we couldn't see it or, at the time, effectively measure it. The data that shows that something else we cannot see or detect other than by it's effects is as solid as acknowledging that Wind is real. There's just a period in which we don't know much about it. The Vera Rubin Telescope will certainly advance that effort in understanding.

As it happens, I have recently read The Little Book of Cosmology by Lyman Page, Princeton Press. I recommend it as a gentle, readable but surprisingly complete and current overview of the landscape.

If anyone doubts the reality, the actual existence of what is called "dark matter", but doesn't really know why we are so sure of its existence and are so intent on finding it, that little book of 110 pages plus appendices will quickly clue you in!

The name dark matter is not mysterious, it is descriptive. We can sense its presence by its effect which dominates in gravitationally bound systems, effects which Page describes as "not subtle". And the amount we sense is huge, about five times the amount of visible matter! We call it dark because we cannot directly see it - it does not interact with photons, nor does it interact via the electrical or nuclear forces as far as we can tell to this point.

It has mass, and it has inertia and interacts via gravitation alone, but it is undeniably "there", and here - we are immersed in it.

Our best guesses as to what it may be is mostly constrained by a process of elimination, as Page says we mostly know "what it is not". It is not clouds of planetary bodies, gas or other forms of atomic matter. It is not black holes or neutrinos or any particle which we already have knowledge of.

My own interest in astronomy, and radio astronomy in particular was largely sparked by my early interest in radio and electronics, which my parents nurtured well. Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, CMB, was still new and exciting, and no one really knew where it would lead. The fact that it was a measurable component of the noise you could see on your TV set made it almost something you could touch.

I can't say that I stayed up to date with developments in the field, but I have read on the subject more or less continuously in the years that have passed, and have a nice personal library to show for it (to which I still add new titles!). I can recall reading about the possibilities that would open up if we could ever just detect and understand the shape of the CMB anisotropy spectrum - and trying to understand what the heck they were talking about!

And I remember reading about the missing matter, dark matter, and the various ways researchers were attempting to find it. Dark matter and the CMB were often mentioned together, but in my mind they never really merged into closely related topics in a concrete way.

Then it happened. In the early '90s data from the COBE satellite demonstrated the existence of anisotropy (variations) in the CMB temperature, and our ability to detect it, and confirmed that it was blackbody radiation. At some point in that time I first saw what that spectrum might look like - it became real to me, I began to actually grasp and explore the ideas I had read about so often.

Then from 2001 data from the WMAP satellite, followed in 2009 by the Planck satellite produced the spectrum in detail that was literally breathtaking! That gave it meaning and in that one plot I could finally grasp the ideas I had read so much about without seeing their actual significance.

And right there in the shape of that spectrum, unambiguous and separated from ordinary matter, we could "see" dark matter as a thing unto itself!

So it is very exciting to know that the Vera Rubin Telescope is now online, producing another, larger set of data that promises to provide a different, closer to home and sharper view of the effects of dark matter, perhaps in concert with other efforts leading to identification and detection in a lab of the elusive stuff!

Exciting times we live in!