World's largest digital camera stuns with 'Ocean of Stars' image Millions of stars, smears of dust, and even background galaxies pack this image, the first major Milky Way view from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in northern Chile. The picture, fittingly dubbed Ocean of Stars, marks the beginning of Rubin's 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. It's a preview of what the observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope will do over the next decade: snap the same crowded star fields every few nights so astronomers can play one epic game of Spot the Difference. Together those space images will form a detailed timelapse video of the visible southern sky. You May Also Like "It's taken 20 years of hard science, engineering, and more to get to the point where we can call 'action' as we start rolling on this blockbuster movie of the universe," said Phil Marshall, deputy director of Rubin's operations, in a statement. "Millions of alerts in just the last couple of months show that Rubin is up and running as a discovery machine." By "alerts," Marshall is referring to the roughly 7 million notifications the observatory sends out about things that have changed in the sky each night. Those messages flood alert brokers — systems programmed to sort and classify the information for scientists. Rubin, built by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, stands on Cerro Pachón, a desert peak high in the Chilean Andes, where the air is clear, dry, and steady. It takes its name from astronomer Vera Rubin, whose work revealed some of the first strong evidence for "dark matter" — an invisible, abundant substance in space that does not give off or interact with light. Ocean of Stars points toward the constellation Lupus, close to the crowded plane of the