By Bella Lee
UW-IT Strategic Communications
On a clear night in the Northwest, you can easily spot Orion’s belt or the Big Dipper peeking over the horizon — a seemingly unchanged sky that untold generations have observed for millennia.
In reality, stars are born, die and explode into supernovae right before our eyes, practically all the time. We just can’t see these changes happening in our daily lives.
This is where the new NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory atop the Andes Mountains in northern Chile comes in. With the world’s largest camera attached to the giant 27.5-foot in diameter Simonyi Survey Telescope, it will let University of Washington astronomers and their global partners observe change in real time.
Rubin took its first commissioning images on April 15, 2025. As the focus and alignment of the telescope was adjusted, the images resolved into the thousands of stars and galaxies that will be just a tiny slice of the billions the full survey will detect.
Towards the end of this year, the observatory will complete its commissioning and begin to photograph the night sky — 1,000 images in all per night over 10 years with a 3,200-megapixel camera. The project will create about 20 terabytes of digital information each night, so much data that it will require powerful computing infrastructure to make sense of it all.
This enormous amount of data would typically take ages to upload to the Internet. However, one of the tools that makes it possible for researchers to efficiently share all this information globally is high-bandwidth, high-capacity networks. And the heart of one of those networks is right here at the University of Washington: Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP).
PNWGP’s Network Capabilities
PNWGP is a nonprofit corporation that serves research and education organizations throughout the Pacific Rim. Operated by University of Washington Information Technology (UW-IT), it provides cost-effective, robust, reliable, high-bandwidth, and high-capacity networking to higher education and researchers across the globe, including UW astronomers working at the Rubin observatory.
UW-IT oversees this super-fast network, which can be up to 200 times faster than the average home Internet and capable of downloading a full HD movie in mere seconds.
The power of this network not only lets people from across the world access astronomical data, but it also helps accelerate research progress in all areas of study.
Data is the foundation of modern research, no matter if you’re working with the big picture to survey the cosmos, or with the minute details to decipher the genome. That’s why researchers rely on PNWGP’s powerful Internet connectivity to access, share and publish their information.
The world’s largest camera soon will begin to photograph the universe — 1,000 images per night for the next 10 years. Photos courtesy of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
The observatory’s massive lens captures faint and distant objects invisible to the human eye.
The images create an enormous amount of data; without modern infrastructure, it would take ages to upload them to the Internet.
But UW researchers won’t have to wait too long for their data. Fast networks, including those managed by UW, means images will be readily available anywhere in the world soon after they are taken.
Speed matters. “The quicker you can get an answer, the quicker you can think about what it means,” and the quicker we can make scientific breakthroughs.” — Andy Connolly, UW professor of Astronomy.
“We get the network out of the way so the researcher can focus on what they’re trying to do and get their research done,” says David Sinn, a network architect with UW-IT.
Since the University handles many research opportunities and projects, it is also able to focus on external initiatives to reach the broader community, he said.
So, how exactly does this PNWGP work? In a nutshell, it connects physical backbone nodes in Seattle, Portland, Spokane and Chicago using fiber connections to enable data to flow freely.
From K-20 to the top of the Andes: local and global impact
PNWGP’s efforts aren’t just confined to the Pacific Northwest. On a global scale, it works on collaborative projects, like the Western Regional Network and Pacific Wave Internet Exchange. These combine the power of each partner institution’s networks to create a larger range of connectivity. Their efforts allow researchers across the globe to connect with colleagues, data, and even scientific instruments, like the Large Hadron Collider, radio telescopes, and soon, the universe in photos from the Rubin observatory.
Last year, PNWGP received the 2024 Innovations in Networking Award for Network Partner from the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), which lauded UW-IT and the PNWGP group for its part in expanding the global research and education network ecosystem.
On a local scale, PNWGP provides connectivity services to the Washington K-20 Education Network, a wide area network that provides internet access to schools and libraries across Washington.
The K-20 Network has 392 directly connected members and serves more than 1.5 million students, faculty, staff and researchers across the state.
Jack Haden-Enneking, the K-20 Program Manager at UW-IT, said PNWGP is a critical partner to K-20 in providing reliable internet connectivity to remote and underserved areas.
“One of the main benefits of K-20 is ensuring high-speed connectivity to every member, regardless of their size or location,” he says. “We’ve built up high-speed connectivity into corners of the state that just didn’t have it before.”
That means a budding young astronomer in a small, rural town in Eastern Washington now has the same access to information as a student in a larger school district.
Widescale connectivity and fast networks allow access to large datasets through the cloud, like the upcoming photos from the Rubin Observatory, something that would not have been possible just a short few years ago.
With a click of the mouse, curious students can quickly uncover answers to the universe’s biggest questions: Why does it expand? Why does it accelerate? How did our solar system form?
Once they have their eyes on an astronomical object or phenomenon, they might want to get more information about it. Supplementary data is scattered across various sources, including NASA’s databases, other cloud databases and telescope archives. Networks like PNWGP’s connect these data sources, making them accessible almost right away.
Up next: Rubin Observatory’s heavy data sets
Research is an iterative process. So, in addition to connectivity, large amounts of data and shared knowledge also allow for rapid problem-solving.
“The quicker you can get an answer, the quicker you can think about what it means,” and the quicker we can make scientific breakthroughs,” said Andy Connolly, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington.
Connolly’s work is deeply dependent on data, and he will be relying heavily on high-speed networks to make sense of what Rubin will be imaging over the next 10 years.
His work focuses on large cosmology surveys and how they “paint” the evolution of galaxies. And this painting by Rubin can help him estimate the properties of galaxies based on their colors, for example.
Most recently, Connolly has been working on using algorithms to improve the sharpness of the images from the Rubin telescope in preparation for the actual photographing of the sky. But Connolly is also an educator who is deeply vested in taking knowledge and making it available across the globe. One of his passions is to take the technology that private companies use to search the internet into a useful tool for research and education.
And a network like PNWGP may just lie at the center of it all.
“The secret sauce of UW is the ability to collaborate and connect,” Connolly said. “It’s that connective web that allows research to be successful.”