On April 15th, at 8pm local time, the Vera Rubin Observatory recorded its very first photons of starlight. At first, the images that filled the screens in the control room on Cerro Pachón, 2,500m high on the foothills of the Andes in northern Chile, looked like a field of snowy static on an old television. But, zoomed in, the spots soon resolved into an uncountable number of stars and galaxies floating between enormous, wispy clouds of dust, like tiny multicoloured flecks of paint spattered across a vast black wall. “There was this huge amount of cheering and screaming, people were getting teary-eyed,” recalls Alysha Shugart, a physicist who watched the events unfold on the night. “Those little photons had no idea of the red carpet that was rolled out for their reception.”