In the air tonight

Sometimes, you can feel it coming in the air of the night.

Weather is fickle, but when a night of observing begins, we usually know how it will go. The first part of this season was often rainy and gray. The last several weeks, however, have allowed for new records in precision the precision of DECam data.

On Nov 11 and Nov 18, 2014, the Dark Energy Survey took exquisite data of all of our supernova fields – the regions of sky selected specifically to look for exploding stars. It was clearer than anything we’d seen previously. The video above is from a night early in this season, when the weather was also extremely good (but only for a few days). It is a view, from inside the dome, of DECam and the Blanco Telescope scanning the sky over the course of one night in August, 2014.

After a few nights of clouds or rain, it usually takes another night or two for the atmospheric turbulence to die down. This turbulence deflects light as it comes through the layers of Earth’s atmosphere, effectively blurring an image. But when this turmoil is no longer there, the conditions can be pristine.

Sometimes, you can feel it coming in the air of the night. It’s the final moment for so much starlight.

We are here to see what it did, see it with DECam’s 570 million eyes. DECam’s been waiting for this moment all of its life. Now we know where you’ve been, traversing the dark night skies.

The light of distant galaxies and stars has been waiting for this moment all that time.

Now forever, we remember where the light has been, how could we forget. When our detectors capture it, it’s the first time, the last time, we’ve ever met. We know the reason you kept your silence up. When it was cloudy, how could we know. When it’s clear, the signal still grows, the universe no longer a stranger to you and me.

Sometimes, you can feel it in the air of the night.

Det. B. Nord

[Hat tip to Phil Collins.]