Vera Rubin Observatory: Lecture 10/8 Los Altos
Mark Wagner
Date: Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Time: 7 PM (PST)
Location: Smithwick Theater, Foothill College, Los Altos
Free Admission
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a unique ground-based astronomy facility, with the largest digital camera in the world, designed to provide a time-lapse “movie” of the entire sky from the Earth’s southern hemisphere. Over its planned ten years of operation, the Rubin Observatory will obtain nearly 1,000 images of every part of that sky. By comparing the various images, we will be able to detect everything that varies in brightness and everything that moves across the sky. By adding together all the images, we will be able to catalog nearly 20 billion galaxies and a comparable number of stars. After 20 years of development, this facility has just come online and will soon begin its nightly operations. Prof. Kahn will review the design, development, and construction of Rubin, and describe the exciting science that lies ahead.
Steven M. Kahn is the Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to returning to Berkeley in 2022, Kahn was the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor in the Natural Sciences at Stanford, and the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Columbia. Kahn received his A.B. degree from Columbia and Ph.D. in physics from Berkeley before beginning his academic career.
Kahn is an experimental astrophysicist and cosmologist who has made major contributions to multiple fields. He was the U.S. Principal Investigator on the Reflection Grating Spectrometer experiment launched on the European XMM- Newton Observatory in 1999. More recently, he served as the Director of the Rubin Observatory construction project from its inception in 2013 until his move to Berkeley in 2022. Kahn is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lance Pickens
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