The Vera Rubin Observatory, located at the summit of El Peñón in Cerro Pachón, Chile, at an altitude of 2,682 meters, has released an image of a star field called "Rubin's Ocean of Stars," with a resolution of 1.7 billion pixels.
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The image published by the observatory contains thousands of points of light crowding in front of your eyes, and as soon as you magnify a small part of them, other points appear that you did not see before, as if you were standing in front of an ocean of stars with no shore.
Amazingly, the image contains millions of stars, according to the scientific coverage, along with distant galaxies appearing in the background. However, the observatory has not yet released a precise count of the stars and galaxies scattered within it.
It is a small window onto a world that our eyes cannot perceive, and an invitation to reflect on the greatness of God’s creation; if this is some of what is hidden in one spot of the sky, then what about the rest of the vast world?
Where is this spot located? And what is its size relative to the sky?
The "sphere of stars" imaged is located between the constellations Centaurus and Alpha-Seven in the southern sky, near the constellation Scorpius. It appears in a region rich in Milky Way stars, and therefore looks different from areas farther from the galactic main plane.
The Rubin camera's field of view is approximately 10 square degrees, while the entire sky covers about 41,000 square degrees. This means that one camera field of view is roughly one-four-thousandth of the sky, although the area of the resulting composite image may differ from a single exposure field.
To grasp this vastness, imagine the sky as an enormous dome divided into thousands of windows. What we see in Rubin's photograph represents roughly one window in terms of the camera's field of view, while thousands of other windows remain to be studied.
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