The Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins a decade-long survey from a Chilean mountaintop, using the largest digital camera ever built to take hundreds of images each night.The 1.7-gigapixel digital camera images the southern sky every 30 seconds through six filters and produces the Legacy Survey of Space and Time dataset for mapping billions of stars and galaxies.Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, the project will detect faint, transient and moving objects, from new planets to asteroids, and will sharpen measures of galaxy formation, clustering and dark energy.Phil Marshall says the calibrated datasets and near-real-time pipelines will allow a global community of researchers to mine petabyte-scale archives and follow transient discoveries quickly.