This has been called the golden age of astronomy, and there’s a new telescope on the block — or, more precisely, on top of a mountain in Chile. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by American taxpayers, on Monday released its first test images.

The Rubin telescope, featuring a 3,200-megapixel camera, promises to see more galaxies than ever seen before, as well as supernovas, comets and millions of asteroids. Sometime in the months ahead it will begin a 10-year survey, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, that will create what the Rubin team calls an “ultrawide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the universe.”

See images from the Rubin telescope and world’s largest digital camera

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory sits at an elevation of 8,684 feet on a mountain, Cerro Pachón, at the edge of the Atacama Desert. The atmosphere there is dry and remarkably stable, making it an ideal location for astronomy.

Travis Lange, a deputy project manager at the Rubin Observatory, shines a flashlight into what Rubin officials describe as the world’s biggest digital camera. It’s about the size of a small car and weighs roughly 6,000 pounds, they said. The camera has an extraordinarily large field of view, about the size of 45 full moons.

The telescope can pivot rapidly, and in just three or four nights can survey the entire sky in the Southern Hemisphere.

The observatory features six different color filters for the camera. According to Rubin officials, the filters will make it easier for scientists to look for evidence of the gravitational effects of dark matter, which has mass but does not interact with light.

These images are taken from what the Rubin team calls the Cosmic Treasure Chest, a combination of 1,100 images from the telescope, according to a news release from the observatory. It reveals about 10 million galaxies — a tiny fraction of the approximately 20 billion galaxies the telescope will capture during its 10-year survey.

In just 10 hours of observations, the Rubin discovered 2,104 previously unseen asteroids in our solar system, including seven near-Earth asteroids, according to a news release. None of the seven asteroids poses a danger to our planet, according to the Rubin team. The telescope is expected to discover millions of new asteroids and will also be effective at spotting interstellar objects passing through the solar system.