Lazuli is a 3m-class space telescope founded and developed by the Schmidt Sciences as part of the Schmidt Observatory System, with a concept to launch timeline of approximately 3 years. The observatory is equipped with 3 instruments (a slicer integral field spectrograph, a multi-band camera array, and a coronagraph) and is designed to allow rapid response (<4 hours) for transients alerts'...
The Hubble tension demands fresh, independent routes to H₀. I present two-rung and one-rung distance ladders that bypass Type Ia supernovae entirely, connecting Cepheid and TRGB distances, as well as geometric maser distances, directly to cosmological redshifts. The first two-rung ladder uses the SH0ES Cepheid sample with Milky Way, LMC, and NGC 4258 anchors, yielding H₀ = 71.7 ± 1.3 km/s/Mpc...
