Vera Rubin Observatory, the newly built home of the largest telescope in the world, unveiled its first test imagery on Monday, including never-before-seen aspects of outer space.

Rubin, due to its ideal position atop Cerro Pachón in Chile, is predicted to be the most effective observatory. It has unique access to capturing billions of years-old astronomical events and interstellar objects. The dark and dry conditions allow the telescope to capture light and observe the cosmos from large distances away. 

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“The Rubin Observatory is an investment in our future, which will lay down a cornerstone of knowledge today on which our children will proudly build tomorrow,” Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios told CBS News.

The test images are from 10 hours of observation and allow viewers to see star-forming regions and distant galaxies, just a glimpse of what is to come when the observatory opens later this year. Specifically, one image captures the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula, formations that glow bright orange and pink in the Milky Way. 

Rubin includes a 26-foot mirror and the largest digital camera ever built. In those 10 hours, it detected 2,104 undiscovered asteroids, while other observatories can discover just 20,000 new asteroids per year.  

The observatory was dreamt up in the 1990s by a group of scientists who wanted to understand dark matter on a deeper level. Construction began in 2015 and was jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science. 

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The observatory is a step to better “understand the history of the universe,” Elana Urbach, a scientist on the project, told BBC News.

A project from the observatory, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will debut sometime this year, sets out to capture that history by scanning the sky nightly over the next decade to reveal the slightest of changes up above in unprecedented ways.