No — the night sky changes in many ways every night. To better explore how the night sky changes, the NSF and the U.S. DOE have commissioned the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Cerro Pachón, Chile. In its final tests before routine operations, Rubin will begin exploring these nightly changes — tiny differences that can tell us a lot about our incredible universe and its astonishing zoo of objects. With a mirror more than 26 feet in diameter, Rubin will continuously image the entire visible sky every few nights to discover new supernovae, potentially hazardous asteroids, faint comets, and variable stars — and map the large-scale structure of the visible universe. Pictured here, the distant central band of our Milky Way galaxy appears to be streaming out from the newly operational observatory. Taken last month, the featured image is a composite of 21 images of the night sky, capturing the airglow on the horizon and the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy at lower left.
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