Space photo of the week: Observatory, or alien planet? Boggle your mind with this 360-degree image

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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which could change astronomy forever when it comes online this August, looks like a planet all its own in this surreal new photo.

A 360-degree panorama as a photosphere from Chile's Cerro Pachón mountain, showing the Rubin Auxiliary Telescope and the Rubin Observatory.
A 360-degree panorama as a photosphere from Chile's Cerro Pachón mountain, showing the Rubin Auxiliary Telescope and the Rubin Observatory. (Image credit: Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Horálek (Institute of Physics in Opava))

What it is: The Rubin Auxiliary Telescope, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Milky Way.

When it was taken: April 2022 and published Jan. 10, 2024.

Where it is: Cerro Pachón in northern Chile, 8,850 feet (2,700 meters) above sea level.

In the lower left of the image is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory — a structure that is on the cusp of changing astronomy forever. When it sees "first light" in August, it will begin conducting nightly surveys of the Southern Hemisphere's night sky using a wide-field 27.6-foot (8.4 meters) Simonyi Survey Telescope (SST) and a 3,200-megapixel camera — the largest digital camera ever constructed. An image showing just the Rubin observatory against the Milky Way is also available.

The observatory's decade-long survey, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), will scan the sky throughout the night, creating 15 terabytes of data per night. It will, therefore, identify anything that moves or brightens, such as asteroids and supernovas, but it's also hoped LSST will discover 20 billion galaxies and stars.The image — which is also published as a panorama, a 360-degree panorama and a full dome — is the work of Petr Horálek, an astrophotographer from the Czech Republic and a NOIRLab audiovisual ambassador as part of the NOIRLab 2022 Photo Expedition.

"Pachon has epic night sky, and I felt I was literally within reach of the Universe ... and also photographing something historically epic," Horálek told Live Science in an email. "The Rubin Observatory will be the best survey telescope for many years ahead ... so what a feeling capturing the new epic history of astronomy."

Horálek used a Canon Ra camera with a Sigma 35mm lens to take a series of 10-second exposures that he then stitched into a panorama.

Jamie Carter
Jamie Carter
Live Science contributor

Jamie Carter is a Cardiff, U.K.-based freelance science journalist and a regular contributor to Live Science. He is the author of A Stargazing Program For Beginners and co-author of The Eclipse Effect, and leads international stargazing and eclipse-chasing tours. His work appears regularly in Space.com, Forbes, New Scientist, BBC Sky at Night, Sky & Telescope, and other major science and astronomy publications. He is also the editor of WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com.