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What’s it like to look into the eye of our galaxy? Facing away from the Blanco Dome, to the north, we can see a clumpy, disc-like cloud spread across the sky. Our solar system resides in the disc of the spiral Milky Way, and when we look out to the cosmos in this direction of the sky, we’re staring into the plane of our home galaxy.
The Dark Energy Survey will observe and study hundreds of millions of galaxies, just like our Milky Way.
Only at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (and high, dry places like it) can we see such detail in the night sky so clearly. Astronomer and amateur photographer Ricardo Demarco (and community user of the Dark Energy Camera) took this image, capturing the edge of the Milky Way with just a single 30-second exposure with his own camera.
Dark Energy Detectives 