Rubin's first data is out. Here's what amateurs can actually do with it.
On July 31, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first science data taken with the LSST Camera: a deep image of the COSMOS field holding more than half a million galaxies and over 50,000 stars in a single frame. That’s the headline. The part that took me a minute to work out, as someone who spent years pulling training data out of pipelines like this one, is what a person outside the collaboration can actually touch. Some of it you can explore tonight from your couch. Most of the catalog is locked for two years. ...