On June 23, 2025, Tony Tyson joined a presentation in Washington, D.C., to unveil an image almost 30 years in the making: 10 million galaxies poised on an inky black backdrop. To appreciate each galaxy in detail, you’d have to stretch the picture across 400 TVs. It’s the first portrait of the cosmos delivered by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new astronomical facility built by the United States on a mountain in Chile. And it captures just 0.05% of the galaxies that the observatory’s mammoth camera will record over the next decade.

That camera is ushering in an ultra-vivid new era of astronomy; it’s also Tyson’s magnum opus.

Tyson, a cosmologist at the University of California, Davis and the chief scientist of the Rubin Observatory, was working at Bell Labs in the 1970s when he encountered a novel imaging chip called a charge-coupled device (CCD) and realized that it could revolutionize the study of the universe. By converting incoming light into electrical signals, CCD sensors are well suited for detecting faint, distant objects in the cosmos. Tyson used the technology to make the first high-resolution map of dark matter, the mysterious, heavy substance that binds galaxies together like an invisible glue.

Then, in the 1990s, other astronomers used one of Tyson’s CCD cameras to study the expansion of the universe and discovered what seemed like a mistake at the time: The expansion was ramping up. The peculiar acceleration revealed the presence of dark energy.

Today, dark matter and dark energy — together composing 95% of the contents of the universe — remain utter mysteries. Even in the 1990s, Tyson knew that to illuminate these dark entities, he’d need to study them with a bigger camera, so he founded the project that has become the Rubin Observatory. Now 85, he is finally introducing his brainchild to the world.

An array of 189 CCDs totaling 3.2 billion pixels, the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera is the largest digital camera ever built. Over the next 10 years, it will repeatedly photograph approximately 20 billion galaxies. Among other things, the photo album will chronicle the convoluted history of how dark matter and dark energy conspired to carve out the structure of our universe.