In her first year of graduate school at Stanford University, back in 2021, Sydney Erickson knew only that she was going to be a physicist. She rotated through different research groups, from particle physics to cosmology, until she started hearing buzz about a giant camera being built on campus for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. “I was drawn toward that community,” she says, recalling those involved with the telescope, which turned on last summer in the Chilean Andes. “Rubin drove me into...