annee25048 — Announcement
Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae
3 July 2025
In this immense image NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a brand new view of two old friends: the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae. The image provides a demonstration of what makes Rubin unique: its combination of an extremely wide field of view and the speed that allows it to take lots of big images in a very short time. Combining images reveals subtle details in the clouds of gas and dust (labeled version here). The more images we can combine, the more detail we see!
This almost 5-gigapixel image combines 678 exposures taken in just 7.2 hours of observing time, and was composed from about two trillion pixels of data in total. No other observatory is capable of producing an image of such a wide area so quickly and with this much depth.
