This week on Please Look Up, we’re climbing 2700 metres above sea level to check out a telescope so powerful it’ll basically binge watch the universe.

The Vera Rubin Observatory has a 3.2 gigapixel camera (yes, gigapixel) and a mission to scan the entire night sky every three days for the next decade. Total cost? A cool $1 billion. Worth it? We think so.

We unpack what this mega project means for science, why Vera Rubin never got a Nobel Prize (but should have), and how her work on dark matter changed the game.

Also in this episode:

• July is peak Milky Way season so rug up, head outside and look up
• Learn to spot the Dark Emu, a brilliant Aboriginal constellation made of shadows, not stars
• Venus and Jupiter are stealing the morning show if you're up early enough
• Space junk is piling up with over 130 million bits of debris bigger than a centimetre floating around. We talk about why that matters and who’s keeping an eye on it

Stuff we mention:

• emudreaming.com – for more on Aboriginal astronomy
• scitech.org.au – if you want to keep learning locally