Christopher Stubbs Colloquium: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory- A New Eye on the Universe Opens

The Rubin Observatory is making the transition from construction into full operation. This facility will provide a decade-long time-lapse movie of the Southern sky in 6 passbands. The unprecedented combination of aperture (8.4m primary) and field of view (~10 square degrees) makes Rubin a powerful discovery machine. I'll briefly review the project's history, and describe how co-added and difference images can be used for projects ranging from searches for potentially hazardous asteroids to observational cosmology. I'll also describe how data from Rubin are being incorporated into an introductory astronomy course, and some ways in which AI is being folded into Rubin operations.