Bob Abel, Olympic College (Emeritus), and DiRAC Institute, Dept. of Astronomy, University of Washington.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is scheduled to begin operations in early 2025. Located on an Andean peak, with a huge mirror and the largest digital camera ever built, its mission is to take deep, panoramic images of the sky every 30 seconds, all night long. Every three nights it will map the entire night sky, and it will repeat this process for ten years. This is by far the most ambitious sky survey ever: in just its first two months of operation, it will gather more data than all of the telescopes in history combined. We’ll talk about what this mission will teach us about our solar system, our galaxy, and the Universe.