Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ready to study dark matter and dark energy in unprecedented detail.

On June 23, 2025, Tony Tyson joined a presentation in Washington, D.C., to unveil an image almost 30 years in the making: 10 million galaxies poised on an inky black backdrop. To appreciate each galaxy in detail, you’d have to stretch the picture across 400 TVs. It’s the first portrait of the cosmos delivered by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new astronomical facility built by the United States on a mountain in Chile. And it captures just 0.05% of the galaxies that the observatory’s mammoth camera will record over the next decade.

That camera is ushering in an ultra-vivid new era of astronomy; it’s also Tyson’s magnum opus.

Tyson, a cosmologist at the University of California, Davis and the chief scientist of the Rubin Observatory, was working at Bell Labs in the 1970s when he encountered a novel imaging chip called a charge-coupled device (CCD) and realized that it could revolutionize the study of the universe. By converting incoming light into electrical signals, CCD sensors are well suited for detecting faint, distant objects in the cosmos. Tyson used the technology to make the first high-resolution map of dark matter(opens a new tab), the mysterious, heavy substance that binds galaxies together like an invisible glue.

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