The Vera C. Rubin Observatory recently launched its 10-year astronomical survey to create the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the universe. While thousands of people played a part in making the facility a reality, Tony Tyson played a formative role, acting initially as the facility’s founding director and now its chief scientist. We sat down with Tyson to discuss his background and the technology behind the Rubin Observatory’s revolutionary camera.

From a mountaintop in Chile, under clear dark skies, NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun the revolutionary Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The ten-year survey is Rubin’s signature campaign to create the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the Universe in history.

TIME has named University of California, Davis Distinguished Research Professor Tony Tyson, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, to the 2026 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The results of two decades of scientific and technological innovation were unveiled today with the reveal of the first imagery captured by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a facility jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Tony Tyson, a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, recounts the origin of the Rubin Observatory and his decades-long journey to make the facility a reality.

Coming online in 2025, the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's enormous, unrelenting eye on the sky will create the biggest, most data-rich movie ever made — a 10-year, high-precision chronicle of trillions of cosmic events and objects across space and time.