The Vera Rubin Observatory's First Look Event happened in July 2025, when the observatory revealed its first look at the cosmos. That was when we were gifted the stunning Cosmic Treasure Chest image, among others.

But the VRO's commissioning camera was active before that. It was mounted on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the VRO in 2022 and observed for seven weeks in late 2024, then was removed in December 2024. It's a fully functional, yet smaller, version of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera, which is, as all spaceheads should know, the largest digital camera ever built.

The Commissioning Camera was built for comprehensive, end-to-end testing of the VRO's systems. It's an engineering test camera, fondly referred to as ComCam.

To mark the two year anniversary of the beginning of testing with ComCam, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released a new image from the ComCam.…