For an amateur observer, the appeal of a survey can lie as much in the observations behind an image as in the image itself. Instruments, coverage and public data make rewarding subjects for a closer look at Rubin Observatory and SPHEREx.
Rubin's first imagery
The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a major scientific facility built at the summit of Cerro Pachón in Chile. It is jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. NSF describes its location as one of the world's best for observing, with dry air and dark skies.
The observatory combines an 8.4-meter telescope with the largest digital camera ever built. Behind that camera is a powerful data-processing system, which receives the information it records. The first imagery was the result of more than two decades of work on the observatory. It was released to the public on June 23, 2025, at an event in Washington, D.C. The NSF announcement described millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars captured in just over 10 hours of test observations, along with thousands of asteroids. NSF described the scale of the cosmic phenomena in the imagery as unprecedented.
The discoveries within the solar system included 2,104 previously unknown asteroids, found in about 10 hours of observations. Seven of those newly discovered objects were near-Earth asteroids; the announcement stated that these seven posed no danger. The imagery was presented as a small preview of an upcoming 10-year scientific mission, whose purpose was to explore and understand some of the biggest mysteries of the universe.
SPHEREx's infrared sky
NASA's SPHEREx space telescope launched in March 2025. Its name stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer. The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The telescope began mapping the sky in May and completed its first all-sky mosaic in December. NASA announced the achievement in a mission report on December 18, 2025. The completed map records the infrared sky in 102 colors. Each one of those colors represents a wavelength of infrared light detected by the space telescope. Every wavelength provides its own information about the galaxies, stars, planet-forming regions and other cosmic features within the map.
Repeated scans and public data
SPHEREx circles Earth about 14½ times a day, traveling from north to south and passing over the poles. Each day it takes about 3,600 images along a single circular strip of sky. As the days pass and Earth moves around the Sun, the telescope's field of view shifts too. Over six months, that changing view reaches every direction in space and records the entire sky through 360 degrees.
In the plan described in December 2025, three more all-sky scans were to follow during the two-year primary mission. The plan called for merging those maps together, so that the combined maps would increase the sensitivity of the measurements. The entire SPHEREx dataset is freely available to scientists and the public, opening these observations to independent study as well as professional research.