DES

The powerful camera built for the Dark Energy Survey has taken more than 1 million photos from its perch in Chile. Here are some of the best.

From Phys.org, September 23, 2021: The Dark Energy Camera, developed and tested at Fermilab, captured images of the
the Fornax Cluster which is about 60 million light-years from Earth. It sits large in the night sky, stretching across more than 100 times larger than the full moon.

From Phys.org, August 24, 2021: Using the powerful 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) created and tested by Fermilab for the DES, astronomers have discovered an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System.

From NOIR Lab, June 25, 2021: The DECam designed, built and tested by Fermilab and funded by DOE, collected the data that lead to the discovery of a giant comet discovered by two astronomers from the University of Pennsylvania.

From NSF’s NOIRLab, June 8, 2021: The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) built and tested by Fermilab, one of the most powerful digital cameras in the world, has taken its one-millionth exposure. DECam’s million exposures include science observations as well as test and calibration exposures taken by the camera while it was being fine-tuned after its construction and installation on the Blanco telescope in 2012.

From Jumbo News, March 31, 2021: Fermilab’s Josh Frieman, Tom Diehl, Antonella Palmese, and Rich Kron as part of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration, have completed scanning a quarter of the southern skies for six years and cataloguing hundreds of millions of distant galaxies.

From DOE, Nov. 20, 2019: Fermilab scientist Antonella Palmese is quoted in this article on scientists’ efforts to get to the bottom of the nature of dark energy. These efforts include the Dark Energy Survey, hosted by Fermilab, and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, on which Fermilab scientists are collaborators.

From Inside HPC, Sept. 15, 2019: Argonne and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications use deep learning to analyze Dark Energy Survey data.

For over two decades, Spanish institutions have been collaborating with Fermilab. From the Tevatron era to the lab’s current neutrino experiments, Spain has made important contributions.

From Cosmos, May 6, 2019: An extensive analysis of four different phenomena within the universe points the way to understanding the nature of dark energy, the Dark Energy Survey reveals.