Vera C. Rubin Observatory releases deep COSMOS field image

The NSF‑DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has issued Early Data Preview 2, a deep coadded image of the well‑studied COSMOS field. The picture was created by stacking hundreds of exposures taken with the 3.2‑gigapixel LSST Camera, the world’s largest digital camera, mounted on the 8.4‑metre Simonyi Survey Telescope at Cerro Pachón, Chile. The image contains more than half a million galaxies and over 50,000 stars, showing structures from nearby Milky Way stars to distant galaxies whose light has travelled billions of years.

The COSMOS field, located away from the dense plane of the Milky Way, has been a reference region for astronomers since the Hubble Space Telescope observations in 2003. Rubin’s new data add unprecedented depth, wide‑field coverage and repeated observations, supporting the ten‑year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) that will monitor the field for changes over time.