Weak lensing with Rubin Observatory cartoon

Posted on August 10, 2025

This is a new version of a similar weak lensing illustration I’d done before, featuring the Rubin Observatory instead of the Blanco Telescope.

alt="Cartoon of weak gravitational lensing. Light from distant source galaxies gets deflected by large-scale structure between those galaxies and a telescope. Comic-style speech bubbles show pictures of the galaxies as they would appear for the telescope, with and without this deflection. When the light is deflected, the images of the background galaxies are distorted."

Lensed only:

alt="Same as above still, but showing only the unlensed case."

Unlensed only:

alt="Same as above still, but showing only the lensed case."